


Moral Hazards

by Dolf241



Category: Warhammer - All Media Types, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Adeptus Mechanicus - Freeform, Alien Sex, Angst, Comeplay, Consensual Sex, Creampie, Cyborgs, Doggy Style, Exhibitionism, F/M, Foursome - F/F/M/M, Hormagaunt, Mating Press, Missionary Position, Monster sex, Multi, Oral Sex, Teaching, Techpriestess, Tentacle Sex, Tentacles, Threesome - F/M/M, Thyruss, Tyranid, Xenophilia, f/m - Freeform, sex show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:21:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22687651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolf241/pseuds/Dolf241
Summary: Abandoned on a deep-space research station, with no human contact outside the rare supply runs dispatched by her Inquisitorial master, the bookish xenoarchivist Jeanna Viscal is forced to turn to the one available outlet she has for relief - the alien monsters placed under her charge.
Relationships: Human/Human, Human/Thyruss, Human/Tyranid
Comments: 1
Kudos: 113





	1. The Transgression

Antimedes Station hung silently in the void. The remaining patches of black and red paint clinging to its hull had cracked and peeled under the weight of centuries, the durasteel plate beneath pitted with dozens of impact craters from stellar micro-debris. It spun slowly, reflecting the light of lonely stars, as isolated as anything in the Imperium of Man could be. To all but the most powerful astroscanners, Antimedes registered as little more than a long-dead, abandoned hulk, lacking even the most basic life-support systems to make it worth inhabiting.

Which was, of course, entirely the point.

Were one to navigate the maze of proximity scanners, sensor-mines, concealed turrets and auto-interrogation routines that protected the station from those pirates and scavengers desperate enough to consider using Antimedes as a lair and enter its solitary docking bay, they would find the station's interior scarcely more welcoming. Miles of dull, rust-clad halls stretched through the station, each blocked by slab-sided bulkheads, their ailing machine spirits seemingly too faded and corrupt to respond to passcodes or intrusion protocols alike.

Which was, again, entirely purposeful.

For if one penetrated further, cutting or blasting the bulkheads open and destroying the mindless servitor-automata which waited patiently on the other side, they would find Antimedes was not nearly as dead as it appeared. Here its halls were lit with cold, sterile light, the creeping metal decay not nearly as prominent, the air stale but breathable. And the silence would be replaced with an endless dirge of grunts, screams and howls that echoed ceaselessly around its corridors.

For Antimedes was a research station belonging to the Ordos Xenos. Here, specimens of every abominable alien creature to plague the galaxy were sent to be studied and catalogued by its sole human occupant. Inquisitor Brochus Raiely, the man responsible for the station's operation, deemed the threat of contamination should Antimedes' containment protocols fail too great for a larger crew, and thus left the task in the capable hands of one of his acolytes, Jeanna Viscal, and a barely-conscious astropath permanently wired into the station itself.

Jeanna leaned back in her seat, cradling the steaming cup of recaff in her hands and cursing the day she'd requested control over Antimedes station. An admired civilian xenoarchivist before being drafted into the Inquisition, she had never possessed the guts for field work and found her new master's crew of lunatics and savages impossible to get on with. Retiring to the station to conduct her studies in peace had seemed like a dream come true, especially with the respectable stipend she received for her services.

Sadly, the reality had failed to match up to her eager imagination. Much of the work was conducted automatically by the fleet of servitors posted alongside her, only the occasional aberrant point of data or unexpected behavioral reaction being flagged up for her personal attention. The station itself was a dismal wreck that had taken eight months to make livable, and in the long silence that followed, even Jeanna, who had been viewed as something akin to a hermit by her archivist peers, found the isolation stifling. 

"And what good is a stipend when there's nothing to spend it on?" she snapped into the empty air, taking an angry slurp of bitter recaff and slamming her feet down on her desk. Her office was one of the few spaces on Antimedes she had made personable, tucking the fraying cables up into the ceiling and hiding the grimy walls behind boards of polished red Vorlan oak. A dozen monitors hung from the ceiling above her desk like an outcrop of metal fungi, and the calendar next to her counted the days until the next supply run.

Twenty-three boxes remained unmarked. Jeanna lived for those moments where the shuttle landed in her hanger, bringing a few blessed hours of human contact, six months of frozen food and liquids, and another list of rejected purchase requests to spoil her good mood. Jeanna scowled at the thought. Brochus, the stiff bastard, vetted her every requisition form. She was sure he took some kind of pleasure in marking most of it off as 'morally hazardous', no matter how tame.

The monitors jumped and flickered in front of her, cycling through image after image of her charges. Jeanna looked up, pursing her narrow lips as the familiar images flickered past.

Scree-bat. Krootox. Hormagaunts. Quillabra. Devilboar. Khymerae.

Dumb beasts and predatory animals, contained because her master felt they had some potential use. Some were merely test subjects for new pathogens and genetic cancers. Others might be trained or controlled. The servitors' job - sorry, her job, Joanna thought with a contemptuous snort - was to prove or disprove each hypothesis, then dispose of the creature if it still lived. Sometimes if a creature's behavior was entertaining enough, she would over-ride the servitors' authority prior to it being vented into space. She smiled. Brochus would disapprove of her sentimentality, but she was long past caring about what he thought.

The images flicked past again.

Khymerae. Loxatl. Kh'et beast. Mallaghra. Squalit.

Jeanna was a slender woman, petite and finely boned, with a narrow face frozen in an almost permanent expression of disapproval. She wore her white-blonde pulled back into a tight bun, a relic of the days when she regularly conducted autopsies and vivisection. One eye had been replaced with a chunky bronze augmetic, its crimson lens buzzing and shuttering as data passed over its retinal displays. It leered out of her face like a lumpen metal carbuncle.

She sipped her recaff and glared at the calendar again, as if she could make the days go past through force of will alone. Martyn, the pilot, was her one point of human contact. A strapping ex-naval man, he kept himself in excellent shape despite the passing of his military days, and had proven deeply sympathetic to her plight. Jeanna sighed, pushing away from the table and pacing the room in irritation. She was going to have him on her mind all day, now.

"Whoever said absence makes the heart grow fonder didn't have to wait six months between getting their leg over," she muttered, squeezing the cheap foam cup. The door chimed and a servitor lumbered in, its dead eyes staring off into nothing as it approached. It was a service model, some vat-grown clone or mind-wiped criminal, lobotomised and wired with enough basic augmetics to serve as a personal assistant.

"Astropathic transmission received. Standby," it chattered.

"Report."

Jeanna felt her spirits lift a fraction. The only time Brochus bothered sending her a message was to make her aware of a new specimen on its way.

"Jeanna. Your latest transmission was of great use in allowing us to predict Vrelik migratory invasions. I wish I could bring better news, but due to warp-displacements from the Cicatrix Maledictum, your supply convoy has been delayed for approximately thirty-five-point-zero-six days."

Jeanna's fingers tightened around the cup. She marched back to her desk, rubbing her temples and praying to the Emperor Brochus was playing some kind of joke on her. At least she had enough food stored to last out.

"Additionally, your requisition manifest has been reviewed and rejected. 'Cardinal Mayel's Secret Lover' is not appropriate literature for a woman of your standing." The servitor's voice was devoid of emotion, but she could still hear the Inquisitor's disapproval in its flat tones. "Cardinal Mayel is a dignified, celibate man and thus your request constitutes a moral hazard. 'Mars needs women' and 'Rouge Trader: the erotic memoirs of lady Yastobel' have been rejected for similar reasons."

"Oh fuck off."

"Similarly, your request for an eight-inch massage baton has been denied. Your duties do not call for any strenuous labour and thus you should have no physical ailments requiring such care."

"Oh, fuck OFF!" Jeanna snapped, spinning and hurling the half-drunk cup of recaff at the servitor. It rattled off the cyborg's cranium and bounced away, spilling the dregs of gritty brown liquid across the floors. The servitor took the hint and marched away, the door chiming once more as it departed. She bunched her fists and flung herself back down in her chair, turning to stare venomously at the calendar. Then she stood and ticked back thirty six days.

Moral hazard. That might as well have been Brochus' favorite saying. Jeanna knew herself, knew she was no heretic. She loved the Emperor. One of the first things she had done upon cleaning out a living space in Antimedes' rusting halls was establish a small chapel for her daily worship. But to her master, anything that distracted from the endless cycle of prayer or duty was a 'moral hazard'. No matter that Jeanna's duty mostly involved long hours of watching servitors do her job for her, leaving her with nothing to occupy her mind but a collection of books she had finished reading months ago.

And she was still a woman, for Throne's sake. Not a servitor or a piece of fleshy machinery like the astropath. She had desires of her own. Surely the Emperor understood that?

The screens ticked by behind her, cycling endlessly.

Q'orl. Scalex. Scree-bat. Krootox. Hormagaunts.

"Pause. Screen five." Jeanna frowned, something catching her eye. One of the monitors rose from the tangle of dangling cables and presented itself for her inspection. Three sleek, predatory shapes circled each other inside a barren metal cell. It was devoid of anything but a pile of shredded fabric for bedding, and the walls were scored with deep gouges.

The hormagaunts were one of her oldest acquisitions. They were engineered creatures, disposable fodder part of some vast hive-species ravaging the eastern fringe of the galaxy. Ordinarily they would be bound to the psychic will of their progenitors, but when removed from their kin, they reverted to simple pack-hunter instincts. Attempts to control them using pheromone discharge had met some success under lab conditions, but failed in the field.

She should have disposed of the trio years ago, but their relentless aggression provided one of her few sources of entertainment. If a creature annoyed her, once it had served its purpose, Jeanna would have the servitors dump it into the hormagaunts' cell and sit back to watch the carnage. The frenzy of slashing limbs and rending teeth brought a spark of bloody amusement to her long vigil. It reminded her of the chrono-gladiator fights she had seen on her homeworld as a young woman.

Jeanna watched as the female - recognisable by the flatter crest of plates that ran down her elongated skull - was slowly backed into a corner by the two males. The alien hissed and snapped at them, clashing the sword-like talons that tipped its primary limbs together. The males seemed unimpressed, snarling back and mimicking the threat display. They bunched their powerful, flea-like hind legs and sprung, bundling the female to the floor and mounting her.

"Oh. Breeding cycle, that's all," Jeanna muttered. All three had been chemically sterilised upon their arrival, but their reproductive instincts remained unchanged. It was nothing she hadn't seen before. All the same, Jeanna sat down and returned her feet to the desk, idly watching the screen. Throne knew she needed something to distract her.

The female had been pinned beneath the larger male, the creature's talons biting into the floor for purchase. Hooked secondary limbs clasped the female's shoulders, who didn't seem to be fighting any more. Its tail lashed back and forth as the male penetrated her and began to thrust, rutting away furiously as if venting its anger over being held captive.

"Throne," Jeanna snorted out a short laugh. "He's really giving it to her tonight."

The second male paced around them, occasionally venturing forwards only to be driven back by a snap of the larger's fangs. It slunk away, phallus hanging hard between his hind legs. Jeanna had never bothered paying much attention to that part of the beasts' anatomy before. The footage was grainy and indistinct, but it looked large. She almost felt sorry for the creature. God-Emperor knew she understood its plight.

A thought occurred.

It was an insidious thing, less a conscious idea than a sort of dim awareness that brushed against the corners of her mind. Jeanna banished it instantly, her face twisting in disgust.

"No. Saints of bloody Terra, no!" She cried. "I'm not that desperate."

But her eyes were drawn back to the screen. The female was almost prone now, the alien's hindquarters stuck up in the air. Jeanna's fingers drummed against the desk. The hormagaunts were lean, sinewy creatures, tense with ferocious energy, perfectly engineered for their purpose. There was something almost beautiful about that, Jeanna thought, watching the tangle of alien biologies before her. They moved like quicksilver, flowing hypnotically from one motion to the next.

The thought returned.

This time it refused to be banished. It sank its hooks deep.

Jeanna turned the screen off and rose, pacing the room, looking for something else to distract her. Her skin, pale from the years spent locked in Antimedes' sunless corridors, was flushed and clammy.

"I'm not going to couple with those...things. It's abhorrent," she told herself, fiddling with the neck of her robes. The featureless grey garment suddenly felt hot and stifling. "What would the Inquisitor say if he found out? If he knew you even thought about it?"

Probably that it was a moral hazard, the thought answered. Just like all the other things you want to do.

"The things would probably kill me anyway. Even if - if I did want to, there's no way I could."

But then, Jeanna thought, she still had the leftover vials from the pheromone tests locked in cold storage. The creatures had been remarkably obedient when she had used them before. 

She continued pacing, occasionally shooting a look at the black monitor hanging over her desk. No matter how many times she told herself it was not only repugnant but impossible, the idea refused to leave her in peace. Her master kept her as a virtual prisoner in his station, with nothing to do and no-one to talk to. Why should she care what he thought? More importantly, how could he expect her not to seek some, any, source of comfort in her solitude?

Jeanna shook her head and marched from the room. She knew the layout of the station by heart and strode towards the storage level. It didn't matter what she or Brochus thought, she told herself, because the tests had been focused around directing the creatures and forcing them to attack specific targets. There was no reason why samples of breeding pheromones would have been taken, which meant there was no way she could follow through on the aberrant idea that squirmed around in her head.

The air cooled as she descended. Jeanna pulled her robes tighter, and though she trembled within the grey swaddling, she knew it had nothing to do with the chill. Frost rimmed the metal walls, the decaying metal hidden behind a white crust. Her breath fogged before her. She ignored the deep-frozen remains of vivisected aliens from across the galaxy, swept past locked units of preserved organs and ganglia, until she reached one of a dozen featureless metal cabinets. Jeanna pressed her hand against the lock and winced as the concealed needle sampled her blood. The lock's simple machine-spirit clicked and buzzed as it verified her identity, before opening with a heavy thud-thunk that echoed down the silent corridor.

A fog of escaping gasses and ice crystals misted the air. Jeanna waved it away. Before her lay rack after rack of glass vials, each colour-coded and organised by date. She ticked each row off in her head as she worked down, muttering the names of long-concluded experiments to fill the silence until she reached her goal.

"Attack, flee, follow..." Jeanna recited the printed text on each label to herself. With each one she felt her resolve growing. Pheromone samples directly related to the experiment bled into secondary samples, ones deemed potentially useful in niche situations. "Danger, safety, rest, breed, eat..."

She stopped, a chill running down her spine. Jeanna plucked the offending vial from its rack, squinting at the smudged word crudely printed on the label. A hiss of breath escaped her mouth. "Servitors. Bloody servitors sample everything."

Jeanna stared at the vial for long seconds. There were two others in the rack. She took them wordlessly, turning them over in her slim fingers. Greasy yellow liquid ran back and forth within.

Was she really considering this? What was she going to do, strip off, slather herself in the alien cocktail like it was some kind of perfume, then march into the hormagaunt cell and bend over? It was insane. It was some kind of heresy, probably. At the very least it was a moral hazard, one that threatened to lead her into greater acts of xenophilia. Dirty stories were one thing, but this...

The grainy camera images swam through her mind. Martyn, her lifeline, was one thing. He was good. He had strong hands. They bedded each other in a slow, drawn-out weave of bodies, making the most of her scant hours of human contact. But she saw him only twice a year. And with the warp storms tearing the galaxy apart making warp travel even more unreliable than normal, long long before that became once a year? Before he was replaced with an automated pilot?

But the more Jeanna thought, the more she realised her compulsion came from something simpler, something more primal. She was tired and angry. She didn't want to be gently loved. She needed something short and brutish and nasty to purge her frustrations. The more she thought about it, the more the savage, animal coupling she had witnessed on the screen appealed.

Jeanna's hand tightened around the pheromone vials. Her life would, of course, be forfeit if Brochus found out.

But how could he?

She licked her lips. "Alright, you miserable old bastard," Jeanna whispered. "I'll show you what a 'moral hazard' is."

Jeanna locked the cabinet and made haste to the specimen wing. No maintenance beyond the preservation of essential functions had been carried out here. Wires and cables hung from the ceiling, occasionally sparking where their protective covers had worn away. Jeanna splashed through a pool of brackish water from a burst pipe and flagged down a servo-skull.

"Bring servitor units A3 to A5 to the cell nineteen. Separate the female specimen from the males and raise the ambient temperature to 23 degrees." The drone bobbed along beside her, taking in her brisk orders. "Arm local defense turrets and slave their activation to my voice imprint."

"Affirmative. Request trigger word for turret activation."

"Nihilus."

"Affirmative." The skull's gravitic engines hummed as it bumbled off down the corridors to carry out her orders.

Jeanna fought to hide a grin of excitement. It had been a long time since she had felt so alive, so vital. She was trembling again, her gut swirling in anticipation. There were a thousand things which could go wrong with her plan, but she was past the point of caring. She needed this, needed to feel the press of another body against her own. Human, alien, anything so long as it simulated a connection between her and a second living being. Servitors clattered past, stinking of promethium from their flamer-implants.

That, at least, was a precaution she could take.

Alien screeches broke the silence ahead. Two servitors held the female hormagaunt in their vice-like hands. They stomped past and bundled the creature into an empty cell, following Jeanna's orders mindlessly. That, too, brought a quirk of a smile to the woman's face. She hated servitors, but now they were proving their worth. What she was about to do...no conscious, living Imperial servent could be relied upon to help her. The lobotomised cyborgs could no more judge her than the aliens could.

She stopped next to a featureless metal door, the number nineteen emblazoned on it in fading yellow paint. Jeanna took a breath. Tried to calm her nerves.

"Open the shutters."

Part of the wall slid upwards, rusting gears squealing in protest as they revealed an inch-thick glass window. The two male hormagaunts paced back and forth. Their dim, bestial minds knew something was happening. Four lasgun turrets had deployed from the ceiling, one in each corner of the room, tracking the aliens as they moved restlessly around their cell. If something went wrong, one word would have them expunge the pair in a flurry of killing light.

If, of course, she survived long enough to speak it.

That should have been enough to hold her back, to quench the fever that had swept through her. It wasn't. Tucking the vials into the side of her mouth for safekeeping, Jeanna disrobed, draping the limp, grey garment over one of the servitors like it was an ugly coat rack. Her skin pimpled in the damp air, the sudden rush of feeling tingling along her nerves. But that was fine. She glanced at status display next to the door, checking it would be nice and warm inside. Her underclothes went next, the sad, sexless garments dropped to the floor and forgotten about. Her face, normally ground down by boredom and disappointment, shone with energy.

Jeanna spat the vials back into her hand. She rolled them around in her palm, knowing this was her last chance to back out. The hormagaunts prowled back and forth, their sleek, armoured forms rippling like water. It occurred to her she should have had one of the males moved into another cell as well. That entering with them both present would be an unnecessary risk, at least until she was...more experienced with handling them.

No, she decided. Too late. She didn't want to give herself an excuse to back out. Jeanna cracked the first pheromone vial and began spreading the greasy liquid over her body. The other two swiftly followed. Thighs and neck first - the rough areas where a hormagaunt's pheromone glands would be located. Then her breasts, rump, anywhere she might want to draw the creatures' attention to. Jeanna dropped the empty vials on top of her underwear. Took a breath. She walked over to the door and pushed the handle down.

"If anything not displaying a human bio-signature tries to leave the cell, kill it."

The servitors behind her chattered affirmatives. Pilot lights sprang into life at the end of their flamers.

In one motion, Jeanna opened the door, slid inside and pulled it closed. The lock slid home with a heavy bang.

Two sets of alien eyes turned to focus on her. They were black and empty things, devoid of warmth of feeling. And though the creatures tensed, they did not attack. Jeanna stood by the door with her heart thudding in her chest, waiting to see if either hormagaunt would make the first move.

They were two-parts reptilian and one-part insect, walking on their hind legs with their taloned forelimbs used for balance. A glossy black exoskeleton shone under the cell's harsh lights, while ridged plates of bony, crimson-hued carapace ran along their skulls, down their backs and across their thighs. Their mouths opened, long, slithering tongues drooling saliva over rows of needle-fangs as they tasted the air. Each stood shorter than a man, their bodies long but slender. When they rose up to study her, their heads bobbed level with her own.

The smaller male moved first. It was younger, its carapace lacking the many scars borne by its older brother. Jeanna held her breath as it approached. Beads of sweat ran down her body, mixing with the potent pheromones tracked across her pale skin. She held out a hand, letting her slim fingers brush across the creature's snout.

"Curious, are you?" She said. The larger male remained where it was, its head tucked defensively behind its claws. Not scared, Jeanna knew. But unsure. Watchful.

She knelt next to the smaller male. It's head tracked her down, puffs of hot breath ticking over her skin. For the first time since she resolved to this course of action, the woman hesitated. What was she supposed to do? Foreplay? How do you manage foreplay with an alien beast?

Her hands roamed over the creature's head, exploring the strange shapes of its carapace places and elongated jaw. Its tongue crept out in reply, as long as her forearm. It wrapped around her wrist like a serpent, its tip weaving in and out of her fingers. Jeanna grinned. "That's it," she said. "That's it. See? I'm not dangerous. I'm just strange."

The hormagaunt let out an odd chirping noise and licked her face. Its tongue was rough and slimy, writhing all the way from her cheek to her hairline, leaving a sticky trail in its wake. Jeanna groaned in reply, a sharp pang of arousal running through her. If she could get that tongue between her legs...

She tugged her hairpins out and tossed them away, shaking her head until her hair fell freely around her shoulders. The hormagaunt's tongue traveled down, now exploring her body in turn. It lapped at her neck and along her clavicle, before dipping to brush against her nipple, dragging deliciously along the sensitive little bud as she whispered encouragement. From the corner of her eye, Jeanna could see the alien's phallus already emerging from its sheath. It was a strangely shaped thing, curved and ridged, with a small, puckered head at the tip that wept stringy fluid.

That's going to go inside me, Jeanna thought. That's what it's going to take me with.

The thought didn't seem as repulsive as it once would have. In fact, the more she studied its twisting form, the more it appealed. She could feel wetness between her thighs, a hollow yearning building in her core. She wanted this. Throne of Terra, Jeanna thought, I want this.

Jeanna snatched a pile of the mangled bedding from beneath the window. The hormagaunt watched curiously, its black eyes following her as she lay on the bare metal and arranged it beneath her hips, lifting herself towards the creature. Its tongue tasted the air again, scenting the strange mixture of human and alien need that must have been pouring off her. It approached slowly, talons clicking on the floor as it paced around her, trying to work out what to do. Its phallus twitched and throbbed. As it passed, she reached out and gently gripped the thing. The hormagaunt froze, its head swinging around to stare at her as she ran her fingers up and down its shaft. Webs of fluid dripped down her wrist.

It was hot, so much hotter than a man's organ, slick and slippery between her fingers. Jeanna felt an alien heartbeat thudding deep within the rigid flesh and knew, despite the vast gulf that lay between them, that they wanted the same thing. Another pang of need rang through her, as sharp and clear as a bell. She twisted and wriggled, turning herself to face the hormagaunt and spread her legs, baring herself to the creature. Its head dipped, tongue running along her thighs, kissing her sex and drawing a long cry of pleasure from her lips.

Finally, the smaller male seemed to understand what it needed to do. Jeanna felt a flicker of disappointment as its tongue withdrew, her sensitive flesh still tingling from the brief contact. Her frustration faded as quickly as it came. The alien maneuvered itself over her until they lay nearly face to face, its strange, sweet-sour smell washing over her. Its phallus butted against her thigh. Fluid - precome, part of her thought distantly - dripped over her pale skin.

"Yes," Jeanna hissed, "Yes, you're almost there."

She angled her hips up and wrapped her arms around the hormagaunt's torso, pulling it closer. It was awkward, unnatural, but with every bright flash of sensation as its organ stabbed and pushed at her lips, Jeanna's hunger grew. Secondary limbs scrabbled along her flanks until, finally, it drove itself into her with a triumphant hiss.

Jeanna cried out, her head lolling back and her legs kicking at the air. She was so wet, so needy, and the alien's organ so slick, it slid between her aching folds with ease, gliding deep into her waiting body. The hormagaunt gave her no pause, no moment to catch her breath. As soon as it felt her tighten around its organ it began to thrust, rutting her with a beast's furious desperation. It cared nothing for the strange shape of its mate, for the way she wrapped her legs around its body or stroked her hands across its ribbed exoskeleton. Her cries of ecstasy went ignored. It was an engineered being, a weapon in animal form, a slave to its instincts to breed and survive.

But Jeanna cared little more for the hormagaunt than it cared for her. For all her perverse, new-found fascination, it remained an alien. A lower form of life, fit only to be exterminated or yoked to mankind's service. Ah, she thought distantly, but what a service it had been yoked to!

The hormagaunt snapped and hissed, lapping at Jeanna's face and breasts as it rutted her and slathering long strings of drool across her skin. Its secondary limbs held her down with surprising strength, as if the young male was eager to prove its dominance over something. With every thrust, the hard, fleshy ridges that patterned its organ tugged at Jeanna's lips and bumped against her clitoris, pummeling her with sharp twinges of pleasure amidst the deep, soothing feeling of its organ driving into her depths. She writhed beneath it, her back arching in pleasure, driving her hips up to meet her alien mate's thrusts.

"Saints, Thone, holy E-Emperor, I should have done this a long time ago," Jeanna gasped. Her mind spun, her thoughts muddied by each brutal stab of pleasure. She could extract more pheromone samples from the female. Do this whenever she wanted. And there were other specimens...

The world seemed to open up to her. A way to fill her days presented itself. Private projects, studying anatomy and behavior, looking for ways the other creatures could be made to satisfy her urges. She grappled the hormagaunt around the neck and pulled its head down until their foreheads touched, the empty hunger in its eyes matched by the mad gleam of her own. Its tongue lolled out, danging with her own until her lips closed around the writing appendage in a mad parody of a kiss.

She knew, sadly, that it couldn't last. Her climax was fast building, and the hormagaunt, with all its bestial urges, had no interest in drawing their coupling out for her pleasure. Its thrusts were already becoming deeper and more erratic, a powerful throb building within the stiff flesh. Jeanna cried out again, a wordless sound of need and want. Desperate to feel the rising swell of ecstasy within her reach its peak. Desperate to feel the hot rush of the alien releasing inside her. Desperate for more...

There was a harsh alien screech from behind her. Jeanna blinked rapidly, her senses returning, a cold shock of fear stifling her growing orgasm. For an awful second she thought the hormagaunt was about to attack, only for it to withdraw from her and scurry back. The older male had advanced from its corner. It was a survivor, gnarled and wary, but its caution had faded after observing its younger sibling. And as it had chased the smaller male from one mate, it had come to do the same again. The two hormagaunts circled each other, hissing and snapping. The gun turrets followed them silently. Jeanna bit her lip. It would be a shame to lose the older one, but better that than have the creatures tear themselves apart over her.

Finally, the smaller male relented, ducking its head and scurrying back. Its sibling turned to her the moment it retreated, stalking forwards, its lean body weaving back and forth like a great panther. It, too, was clearly ready to mate, its gnarled purple organ twitching eagerly. Jeanna's breath caught in her throat. It was the larger down there, too, and all her years of observing the pair told her it was by far the more dominant.

But the idea didn't frighten her. If it wanted her dead it would have attacked already. The alien wanted nothing she wasn't eager to give it. But, she thought, perhaps best not to keep it waiting.

Jeanna rolled onto her hands and knees. She spread her thighs and lowered her head, mimicking the submissive pose she had watched the female take. Her sex shone in the light, flushed and eager, dripping with her wetness and the smaller male's fluid. The rest of her was barely in a better state, slimy with pheromones, sweat and saliva, her hair a tangled, soiled mess. She could hear the male stalking back and forth, the click-click-click of its talons echoing through the room, and let out a long groan of anticipation.

When it happened, it happened suddenly. The larger male pounced, landing atop her and driving her to the floor. There was no hesitation, no clumsy squirming as they sought to line up their mismatched anatomies. Jeanna gave voice to a great cry of pleasure as the hormagaunt plunged into her, her silken walls clamping down on the twisting alien organ as it buried itself up to the hilt. There was a great rush of heat and force, a twinge of pain as she was spread asunder, and the weight of the alien monster bearing down on her from behind.

Like before there was no pause for her to recover, no chance to catch her breath. The younger male had been curious, unsure of itself and its mate, but the older had no such reservations. It mated her savagely, its secondary limbs digging into her buttocks to hold her still. Jeanna moaned and wriggled beneath it, managing to slip her arms under her head for a cushion before the hormagaunt shoved her back down again. She could feel it throbbing inside her, deep in her core. Each thrust was a sweet invasion that pushed her to her limits. Her climax, once stalled, began to build again.

The smaller male circled them sullenly, its organ still hard and dripping between its legs. As it passed close to her, Jeanna grinned. She pushed back against the alien rutting her from behind, ignoring its snarl of warning as she braced herself on one arm. With the other she stroked the smaller male along the flank, under its thigh and gripped its organ. It clopped towards her, unsure but obedient, as she raised the thing to her mouth and licked.

It was sour. Not terribly pleasant. But the rush that passed through her was beyond compare. She lapped again, tasting the salty tang of her own wetness on the monster's organ, then slipped the head into her mouth and sucked. The poor thing had been denied twice after all, she thought, her tongue swirling around aching flesh. It was the least she could do. Jeanna rocked back and forth, every thrust from the older male driving her onto its younger peer, the two aliens hissing and screeching in pleasure as they mated her.

The xenoarchivist's mind spun, lost beneath a white-hot tide of sensation. The rasp of carapace against her soft skin, hot saliva pattering across her shoulders. Thick precome in her mouth, stringy against her cheeks. The intoxicating, alien scent that surrounded her. Every thrust. Every snap and snarl. Every pang of ecstasy that echoed through her. Every moment brought another new feeling, easing her closer and closer to her climax. It was raw, brute physicality, sex devoid of the trappings and pretensions society strung around it.

Jeanna came. She was exhausted and strung out to her very peak, stimulated beyond anything she could have imagined. It crushed her, washing through her body like a tidal wave, every muscle tensing so hard her fingernails dug bloody weals in her palms. Jeanna wailed around the organ in her mouth, her sex clamping down on the second alien's phallus as if desperate for the alien's release.

Neither hormagaunt kept her long in waiting. Just as the last surges of her climax began to fade, the larger alien reached its peak, driving itself into her one last time. It twitched and spurted, flooding her depths with pulse after pulse of thick, boiling seed. Jeanna let out a deep groan as the hormagaunt inched its organ deeper, still coming, spurts of glutinous fluid forcing their way past the tight seal her lips had made around the alien's base. It tingled hot on her lips, dripping over her bud, the bright, stinging notes of pleasure coaxing a second small climax from her ravaged form.

Its sibling followed soon after, pouring itself into her mouth as if it sought to drown her. Jeanna coughed spluttered, and dragged her head away, the remainder of the beast's come slathering over her face and into her hair. The smaller hormagaunt staggered away, collapsing into a heap and licking herself clean. A moment later, the larger did the same, wrenching itself free of Jeanna's body with a wet sucking noise and retreating to the opposite corner of the room. With a long, tired groan, Jeanna flopped forwards and rolled onto her back, panting like an animal. Exhaustion clawed at the corners of her mind. Something, some little spark of rationality that had watched her frenzied mating in distant amusement, told her that remaining in the cell any longer than was necessary was a bad idea.

So, with a pained grimace, the xenoarchivist lurched to her feet and trudged over to the door, unlocking it and stumbling out before the waiting servitors. They watched with all the placid impartiality of their kind as she wiped herself down with her underwear and draped her robes over her slimy, glistening body. The servo-skull hovered nearby, anticipating orders.

"Run...run a bath. A hot one," Jeanna mumbled. "And prepare a meal. One of the good ones. With some wine."

She licked her lips, the taste of the hormagaunt's seed still in her mouth. "And take some more breeding pheromone samples from the female hormagaunt. I have a feeling we'll be needing more of those before long."

\---

Jeanna leaned back in her seat, her feet propped up on the desk and her hair falling freely around her shoulders. The sour expression was gone from her face now, replaced with a broad, contented smile. Antimedes Station was still a cold, decaying piece of space junk floating in the middle of dead space, but life aboard it had improved since her...revelation. It was funny, she thought, how much difference a few small pleasures could make. And as she had discovered, many of the aliens in her captivity possessed rather large pleasures. But it wasn't just the sex. At last she'd found something to occupy her mind, something which the vast archives of alien lore she had studied in her youth hadn't covered. A half-written treatise on Kroot reproductive habits lay across her desk, while pict-footage taken from her bionic eye flickered across the screens above. It was of dubious value to her new field of studies, of course, showing the floor, ceiling, or underside of her subject as much as anything useful, but it amused her to record the highlights of her research.

If that was what one could call it. Brochus had even approved the delivery of a dedicated pict-skull. It even sounded like he believed her claim it was to assess damage to Antimedes' sealed levels.

She sighed and stretched, languidly rolling her shoulders. She had one more subject to examine before completing her next project. Jeanna finished her recaff, dropped the cup onto the floor for a servitor to clean, and swept from the room, leaving a scattering of Krootox anatomies fluttering in her wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written August 2018.


	2. The Accomplice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jeanna's newly-sanguine life is threatened by the arrival of a derelict space craft, bearing a single life sign aboard. Fortunately, the new arrival proves to be just as open-minded as she is.

Jeanna had become quite fond of the Thyruss. Few of her charges could be considered beautiful in any conventional sense, and most sported dispositions which matched their savage appearances. But in a menagerie of claws, jaws, matted hair and scaly carapace, the Thyruss was a true wonder.

Scintillating bands of ruby and emerald light played off the steel walls of its cell, reflecting and mixing with the luminous excretions it had painted across their barren surface. It was a strange thing, a squat ovoid creature perhaps two thirds the size of a man, with a squashed head and a rippling fringe of cilia about the base of its sluglike body. Gill-like mouthparts fluttered and twitched as it coiled its dozens of glowing limbs tighter around her body, holding her aloft and tugging her deeper onto the tough, root-like phallus it had buried in her sex.

When she was tired, stressed, or simply in the mood for a tryst that wouldn't leave her sitting on cushions for the next few days, she came to the Thyruss. Jeanna didn't know if the creature was sentient in any real way. She knew its kind created technology and had fought Imperial crusades to a standstill in the past, but it had never tried to communicate nor fought against its imprisonment in the way a thinking being would. It had taken her a few attempts to make her intentions clear, but the effort had been well worth it.

The xenoarchivist's head rolled back, her natural eye half-closed as she swayed back and forth, watching the colours dance across the ceiling in time with the Thyruss' thrusts. Both had already climaxed, the soft haze of pleasure leaving her feeling curiously weightless as she rocked back and forth. There was a faint tension in the squirming flesh between her thighs, and the alien released another thick burst of come into her.

Jeanna smiled lazily. That was another reason why she liked the Thyruss so much. It had the most wonderful stamina. She could while away hours contentedly wrapped in its embrace, shuddering through one gentle orgasm after another until the creature was finally spent. Servo-skulls buzzed and hummed around them, their pict-catchers greedily recording Jeanna's slow copulation. For scientific reasons, of course.

The shrill cry of an emergency siren tore her from her reverie. Warning lights came on, drowning the Thyruss' scintillating colours in a ruddy wash of crimson. It hooted in alarm and dumped her unceremoniously on the floor, wrapping its tentacles around itself protectively as it drew back.

"What - " Jeanna staggered to her feet and lurched over to the door, falling against the frame for support and punching in the access code. It hissed open to reveal the pair of servitors she had left behind, ready to intervene should her latest dalliance go awry. She snatched her robes from the closest and slung them around her shoulders. "You - report! What's happening?"

"Proximity warning. Proximity warning. Unidentified craft has breached exterior defence zone and is approaching the station. No response to long-range vox hails. Proximity warning. Proximity warning..."

The slack-jawed thing was repeating itself endlessly, but Jeanna heard nothing. Her blood ran cold. Antimedes was no military installation. It relied on secrecy, layers of semi-sapient servitor mines and a handful of external defence turrets to protect itself, all of which would crumble in the face of a direct assault from anything more determined than a handful of pirate vessels.

Jeanna pushed the thoughts aside and headed for her office. She scurried through Antimedes silent, rusty corridors like a rat fleeing for the safety of its nest. Her bare feet splashed through pools of grimy water and coolant dripping from ruptured pipes. Here and there the dull red lumins had failed and she was forced to fumble her way along by memory, running her hands over the metal walls until she found her way back into the light.

She burst into the room and collapsed into her seat. Taking a moment to compose herself, Jeanna pulled one of the dozen vidscreens mounted above her desk down and woke the station's ancient cogitator-core, hastily punching in codes to access the long-range auger feeds. The screen hissed with lines of crackling static before, with agonising slowness, breaking apart to reveal the comforting black and green interface.

Data scrolled past. What Antimedes lacked in defences it compensated for with sensors. The interloper was already being dissected by an array of satellite-probes seeded through the minefields, every fragment of information they could gather referenced and cross-referenced before being fed back to the station.

Jeanna sorted through it with practised ease. The ship was civilian, an Imperial merchant freighter sporting several non-standard modifications. Warp-capable, but its drives were only rated for short jumps. She frowned at that, her earlier fear starting to dissolve. The ship shouldn't have been able to reach Antimedes under its own power. She tapped a pair of input runes, calling up more information. Damage reports scrolled past.

Multiple hull breaches. Engines non-functional. Shields non-functional. Life support on the point of collapse...

She made an irritated noise in the back of her throat. "Can you give me a visual?" she asked.

Another screen descended, fuzzed into life, and resolved. Jeanna took a sharp breath.

The ship was a wreck. Its proud, wedge-shaped prow had been reduced to a twisted muzzle of blackened metal and ceramite. The bridge had been destroyed entirely, blasted apart or torn clear by a collision. Half the port side lay ripped open to the void, and a glittering trail of shed debris marked the hulked ship's path through the cosmos. There were no identifying markers Jeanna could see beyond the remains of the cog and skull symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus emblazoned on one side.

The image panned around, new footage coming in from the exterior drones. The ship was studded with deep craters. Their edges were strangely soft-looking, as if something had melted through the hull.

"Melta-cutters?" Jeanna wondered aloud. "Was it boarded? Let me see. Life signs, life signs..."

The cogitator chattered and hummed. Jeanna licked her lips anxiously. Two words blinked up on the screen.

\---Minimal. Fading.---

Jeanna leaned back in her seat, her hands pressed anxiously over her mouth. Logic told her that whatever was over there was more likely to be some form of alien scavenger than anything human. A few simple commands and the mines would activate, homing in on the crippled ship and blasting it into pieces small enough for Antimedes' turrets to pick off at leisure. It would be the sensible thing to do. It would also be what her master would wish of her.

In the days to come, she would say to herself it was that which held her back - that her decision was another act of rebellion, another way to prove to herself she was more than a mindless cog in Inquisitor Railey's vast network of agents and informants.

But in truth, despite her rampant contrarianism, her general irritability and short temper, and her newly-found enthusiastic xenophilia, Jeanna Viscal was an honest servant of the Emperor. The idea of abandoning another human being to a cold death in the void was simply too much to bare. She grimaced and rose from her seat, summoned one of her servitors, and began issuing orders.

\---

The void-suit was heavy and uncomfortable. It made her sweat like an ork even in the chill of space and it stank of old grease and oil. Jeanna murmured the prayer of sanctity against the void under her breath as she advanced, slowly playing the flickering lumina mounted on her shoulder across the corridor. Occasionally she would pause as a deep tremor ran through the ship. The void was deathly silent, but she could imagine the creaking and groaning of metal under stress coming from all around her.

The interior damage matched the harm done to the ship's outer hull. Everywhere she looked there were signs of struggle; bullet-holes and brown stains on the walls, scorch marks and damaged walkways where grenades had detonated. Servitors tramped after her, ice crystals forming on their dead flesh. They sampled everything, scanning and analysing, weapon-mounts tracking her lumina as they watched for hostiles. Servo-tugs swarmed outside, latching onto the ship's hull and slowly arresting its movement.

The first corpse she had found had startled her. Clad in burnished gunmetal armour and white robes, it had seemed shrunken and pitiful, curled in a fetal ball at the intersection of two corridors. Jeanna had stood back, trying to maintain an air of scientific detachment as the servitors picked over the man. He had been a Skitarius, one of the Adeptus Mechanicus' holy footsolders. Now he was...less. A thing of shrivelled flesh and failing bionics. She logged it and moved on.

More had followed. The confusion arose when she found more Skitarii, some in the familiar silver and white, others in deep red plate and swaddled with black robes. A cursory examination showed the black-clad cyborgs had fallen trying to hold the white-clad ones back. Conflict between various competing Imperial factions was hardly unknown, but a full-scale boarding conflict between two Mechanicus divisions? It seemed impossible.

Jeanna shook her head and pushed on, glancing down at her auspex to ensure she was still on the right path. The faint life-signs were holding steady, a few hundred meters ahead and two deck levels above her, in what should be a medical bay. Servo-skulls fanned out as she went, probing ahead and filtering through crawlspace and access passages. They went unchallenged, either by lurking alien horrors, hostile boarders, or by the ship itself. The vessel's great spirit had departed, leaving its bulkheads open and unlocked.

She redirected a trio of drones to sweep the cargo bay. The prospect of looting the dead made her queasy with guilt, but Antimedes was always short of supplies. Necessity always won out.

At length Jeanna and her lumbering escort reached the medical bay. Two windows looked out into the corridor either side of the access portal. They were frosted with ice, but she could see a dim light shining through them. Dancing red runes floated on an access panel next to the door, stubbornly barring her entry.

"Well, they kept power to this part, at least. Maybe the last survivors locked themselves in and vented the ship?"

Her entourage of servitors stared on mutely. Frost crunched under Jeanna's fingers as she wiped a patch of window clear. Cabinets hung empty, strewing surgical tools and supplies haphazardly across the floor. The bulky, arachnid form of an auto-medicae unit lay on its side, and a number of lesser beds had been thrown from their moorings to heap awkwardly against the left-hand wall.

"Impact damage," Jeanna murmured to herself. "Doesn't look like anything breached the room, though. Hang on, what's that?"

A blinking light in the corner drew her attention. Jeanna hurriedly cleared away more of the ice and craned up on her tiptoes to peer deeper into the room. There, half-shrouded in shadow and cradled by a dozen support cables as thick as her arm, lay the heavy oblong form of a status crypt. Three status lights flickered across an external info-monitor; green, green, green.

Jeanna gasped sharply. The crypt alone would be worth a fortune if returned to the Adeptus Mechanicus. But more importantly, there was someone in there. Someone alive. 

She hurried back from the window and ordered her servitors forwards. Melta-torches and lascutters flashed bright in the gloom. The door glowed red, then white, then finally sagged and blew outwards as the room depressurised. Jeanna yelped and ducked behind one of her larger bodyguards, clinging to its metal shoulders as a hurricane of scalpels and medi-vials blasted past and ricocheted madly from the opposite wall.

Slowly she poked her head out, then approached, navigating through the drifting tangle of stretchers and medical surplus towards her goal. The lights on the crypt burned a steady green, the weak light shining from its interior seeming to brighten the closer she came. There, lying in the padded interior, was a figure swaddled in red armour and black robes. Dark hair spilled from her cowl, framing a silver half-mask studded with irregular optical clusters above a delicately pointed nose and tapering chin.

"Praise the Throne," Jeanna breathed. "Whoever you are, you were certainly blessed by someone. Let's get you on board."

\---

The woman remained unconscious for three days after she was removed from the status-crypt. She was in remarkably good health, with no wounds and nothing but a case of mild malnutrition to show for her ordeal, and Jeanna soon transferred her from Antimedes' tiny medical room to a couch in her office to recover. And while she fed and cleaned the other woman, she worried.

In some respects Jeanna was elated. The prospect of regular human company after so many years trapped alone of the station left her giddy. And what was more, the woman was clearly an Adept of the Mechanicus! If anyone could help her turn Antimedes from a miserable, rusting hulk to something actually liveable, it would be her.

But...she would no longer be alone. She would no longer have the freedom to indulge herself with her specimens. Worse, if the woman learned of what Jeanna had been doing, she could find herself accused of heresy and trapped on board with a zealot intent on making her displeasure known. Jeanna could not even rely on deleting the collection of recordings hidden in the station cogitator's memory banks; for all she knew, the ancient device might regurgitate incriminating data-fragments while under the techpriestess' care.

More than once Jeanna found herself thinking about her duty. Antimedes was supposed to be secret. Railey would have ordered her to silence the other woman to protect that secrecy, and there was no denying it would protect her indiscretions at the same time. For hours Jeanna paced Antimedes' corridors, her footsteps echoing from its barren walls, thinking. She wouldn't even have to do it herself, she told herself. She could order a servitor to toss her out an airlock.

There was the matter of supplies as well. Her probes were still compiling an inventory of the ship, but they had already uncovered several crates of ration-packs. That would keep them going for a while, but with an extra mouth to feed, she would need extra supplies from Railey, and it wouldn't be long before he decided to investigate.

Everything told her she should have the woman euthanised. But every time Jeanna resolved to see it done, the idea of having a companion, of having someone to talk to again, made her stay her hand. So she paced and fretted, torn by indecision, unable to even commit to destroying the evidence of her.

On the fourth day, the woman stirred. Jeanna looked up sharply from her desk, almost dropping the foam cup of cooling recaff in surprise.

"Oh. Diagnostics...green. Potentia reboot underway, progress acceptable. Praise the Omnissiah for his benevolence," The techpriestess murmured to herself. Then she sat up, her optical clusters rearranging themselves on a circular mount, their lenses glowing bright blue as the world returned to focus. "How long was I drifting?"

Jeanna opened her mouth to reply, but the woman cut her off. "No, wait, don't answer that, my chrono just came back online. Sacred cogs, sixty-three years? What happened? Where am I?"

"Antimedes station. We're on the north-west of Segmentum Pacificus, far our from the nearest warp route." Jeanna watched the other woman carefully. "Your ship drifted into range of my augers. It came close enough I was able to board it with a shuttle and rescue you. It's been anchored outside the station now, not that it'll do you much good. The only power left was - ."

"Was powering my crypt, yes," the woman sighed sadly. She shook her head and let out a short blurt of machine-noise. "The Lux Astra Eterna. A good ship, gone to its rest too soon. So, you're the mistress of this station? I suppose introductions are in order. Merlina Kesh, Praefect Acquisitor of Stygies Eight." She extended a pale hand for Jeanna to shake.

After a moment of hesitation, Jeanna took it. "Jeanna Viscal. Xenoarchivist, first class. Formerly a sub-deacon at the Montibak academies on Heraldo's World, now the mistress of...this place." She waved a hand. "Antimedes Station. Purely by merit of being the only person here that isn't lobotomised."

"Xenoarchivist?" Merlina's eyes rotated on their axis. Jeanna had the uncomfortable feeling she was being examined. "Ah, but of course. In all things, the Omnissah's work is made clear."

Jeanna grunted. "Right. Well, we'll get to that in a second. There's still some important things I need to know." She returned to her desk, steepling her fingers and watching Merlina carefully over them. "What happened to your ship? You were assaulted by another Mechanicus division, weren't you? Skitarii were fighting Skitarii."

Merlina shifted uncomfortably. She was not nearly so good at hiding her emotions as many techpriests Jeanna had encountered. "That is a - a matter for the Omnissiah's servants alone to discuss. It concerns the, ah, the higher mysteries of our order, and as such - "

A heavy thump cut the woman off. Sitting on the table, gently rocking back and forth where Jenna had tossed it, lay a stylised letter I forged in plain unadorned lead. The little colour in Merlina's face drained like blood running down a sink.

"Ah."

"Yes, 'ah'. Merlina, I don't want to be unpleasant about this." Jeanna leaned over her desk, giving the woman a sharp look. "But this is an Inquisitorial facility. I'm not even an acolyte, just an employee, but as its mistress I still carry some of my Master's power. And technically speaking he would order me to send you out the airlock just to protect its secrecy, so please, don't try my patience with lies or deception."

Merlina sagged. "Yes. Very well then. My ship was returning to Stygies Eight with..." she hesitated and chewed her lip. "A cargo of alien technology liberated from another Forge World. Metallica, to be precise. Stygies is not well-respected by its peers, and they often take steps to hide their discoveries from us."

Jeanna raised an eyebrow. "You're a pirate?"

"An unsanctioned acquisitioner, thank you very much. I had the full backing of my synod. They chased us down, recovered their cargo and decided to claim our ship as recompense for the trouble we had caused them." Merlina shifted uncomfortably. "They seemed to think we had engaged in some manner of heresy."

"And had you?"

"No!" Merlina cried. A pair of slender mechadendrites extended from beneath her robes and thrashed in agitation. "No, never! My masters on Stygies are more open-minded than some. They make extensive studies of alien biology and technology for the purposes of bending them to Mankind's will, or at the very least, destroying them in more expeditious fashion, nothing more. But to some hardliners within the Mechanicus, such investigation alone is enough to earn the heretek's brand. We - "

Jeanna held up a hand, cutting the other woman off. Her expression softened. "That's fine. I believe you. Throne knows there's a few of my Master's rivals who would balk at my own studies here. You can stay, at least until you find a way to return to your Forge." She lifted a shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. "Or we run out of food and starve. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

She rose from her desk and gestured to the techpriestess. "Come. I'll show you around, and then we'll get onto the matter of where you'll be sleeping..."

\---

Over the next few days, Merlina gradually settled into life on Antimedes Station. She proved to be a hardy and resourceful individual determined to earn her keep, and quickly set about patching and re-routing the hundreds of minor breakages and malfunctions that regularly bedevilled Jeanna and her charges. Corridors that had once been half-submerged deathtraps were drained and cleaned, failing lumina-strips were replaced with functional lights salvaged from the Lux Astra Eterna's corpse, and ailing genetoria were miraculously nursed back to full health.

She proved her value in other ways as well. After so many years of isolation, Jeanna found it hard to tear herself away from the other woman. She trailed around after the techpriestess as if she expected her to vanish into thin air, badgering her with conversation or simply lurking on the periphery as she went about her self-appointed tasks. Merlina herself seemed grateful for the company. She had inherited the obsession with Xenotech common to many of Stygies' machine-priests, and the two women often spent their evenings avidly discussing the way their independent fields of research coincided.

"It's an impressive coincidence though, isn't it?" Jeanna remarked once. "The odds of your ship drifting into sensor range of anything before the crypt's power died was slim to begin with, let alone you ending up here."

Merlina had shaken her head and smiled. "Not at all. The universe is built upon a foundation of logic; what you see as random chance, I see as the divine patterns of the Omnissiah made manifest. If I am here, it is because I am supposed to be here."

The idea that Merlina had been sent by the Emperor as a reward for her long and diligent years of service, to act as her companion and support her studies, was a seductive one. She might even have believed it were it not for the sordid collection of files lurking in her cogitator's memory banks. As foolish as it was, Jeanna couldn't bring herself to delete them. Merlina's presence made it impossible to sate her desires in the flesh, leaving the xenoarchivist with no choice but to vicariously relive each memory in the privacy of her quarters.

There was no risk of discovery, she told herself; Merlina had been forbidden from accessing the central cogitator on the grounds that its contents were restricted to those with Inquisitorial clearance. But it frustrated her. As the days became weeks, she found herself longing for more than the sterile recordings could provide. The gentle rasp of slick carapace against her skin, the laboured growls of exertion, the weight of an alien body pinning her to the deck...all of it waited teasingly out of reach, locked a few levels below her. It was maddening.

Her fingers, as skilled as they were, brought little lasting satisfaction. It was like there was a place in her they couldn't reach; a level of ecstasy that, once touched, now eluded her. No matter how many times she brought herself to climax, curled up on her cot, biting the pillow so Merlina wouldn't hear her cries of frustration, it wasn't enough. Once she even thought of propositioning the other woman, but discarded the idea as absurd. Merlina was an Adept of the Machine God - she was in all likelihood beyond such urges entirely.

\---

It was almost three weeks to the day since Merlina had awoken from her slumber. Antimedes' research and habitation levels were in the best condition they had ever been, and work had begun on improving the conditions of the holding pens. Jeanna descended the stairs leading to Merlina's workshop with a steaming cup of recaff in each hand. The techpriestess was hunched over her bench, her mechadendrites turning a blown-out capacitor fuse this way and that as she made minute adjustments to the device. The door hung open, so Jeanna rapped her knuckle against the wall to catch the other woman's attention.

"Hmm? Ah, thank you." Merlina motioned towards the desk. Jeanna set one of the cups down, watching in amusement as the techpriestess struggled with the fuse. Eventually she let out an exasperated sign and dropped it onto the metal slab, where it rolled off to join the dozens of other half-repaired pieces of machinery salvaged from her ship.

"Being stubborn, I take it?" Jeanna remarked.

"No, I just don't have the tools here to make the necessary micro-repairs." Merlina delicately retrieved her drink and took a mouthful of the bitter liquid. She sighed gratefully, an indulgent smile creeping across the organic portion of her face. The techpriestess really was quite pretty, Jeanna thought. While they both shared the unhealthy pallor of those who rarely saw the sun, Jeanna was skinny and petite, with a pinched, serious face. Beneath the steel mask that had replaced her eyes, Merlina's lips were full and red, always ready to twist into a wry smile, and her robes outlined a set of curves that stole Jeanna's eye and filled her mind with questions.

Merlina was watching her expectantly, an amused look on her face. Jeanna blinked and realised she had been staring. "Sorry, I was...uh, lost in thought. You know how it is." She laughed nervously. "Did you say something?"

"I said, we're going to have to start moving the specimens to new cells soon. I want to make a proper start on renovating the holding decks. More security systems, cells purpose-built for their occupants, that sort of thing. If we're going to be holding onto some of these creatures for the considerable future, it makes sense for their environments to be as comfortable as we can make them."

Her optical lenses cycled idly. Was there a knowing look there, Jeanna wondered?

"Some of the Lux's supplies can be turned to that end, thankfully. Our hydroponics deck wasn't hit too hard. Actually, I had a thought about that." Merlina turned in her seat, resting her chin in the palm of her hand. "We could clear out one of the larger rooms and turn it into a joint holding cell and hydroponics lab. It would give us a contained environment to observe the creatures in and serve as a source of food. And sometimes it's nice to feel soil between your toes, no?"

The smile hadn't left Merlina's face. Jeanna glanced down. She couldn't remember having seen the techpriestess wear anything but a pair of heavy work-boots, let alone go barefoot. "I - yes, that would be wise," she said, hiding her face behind a deep gulp of recaff and backing off a step. The urge to check her cogitator's access-logs was suddenly overwhelming. "Merlina, have you - "

"Been rooting around in the cogitator? Yes, Jeanna, I'm sorry. One of the coolant pipes ruptured and a full copy of the station's blueprints was necessary to affect a repair. I stumbled upon your private studies while I was communing with the machine's archival databanks."

Jeanna's insides turned to lead. Merlina's tone was light, the amused smile still light on her face, but there was no hint of a lie in her voice.

"You found my - you saw that - "

One of Merlina's optical lenses spun in its mount. "That you've been laying with the captives? Oh, wipe the horrified look off your face, Jeanna. You've been stuck here, what was it? Eight years? Nine? On your own? It's hardly a surprise you'd turn to the specimens for company, you're just as much a captive as they are." She sipped her drink. "Frankly from the timestamps attached to these, I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. All that erotic literature stacked on your wall did its job, I suppose."

Jeanna sagged forwards and sat heavily on an unoccupied bench. Her head spun. It felt like her heart was about to burst out of her chest. "So you don't - you're not - "

"Not going to accuse you of heresy, or unforgivable acts against the Emperor-Omnissiah, or any other such puritanical nonsense. I'm Stygian, Jeanna; I'm a Xenarite."

When she saw Jeanna's blank expression, Merlina sighed. "We're a small faction within the Adeptus Mechanicus that believes in subverting alien technology for mankind's benefit. Not just studying how best to destroy it, but to understand, subvert, and finally replicate it for our own benefit. Do you see now why I think washing up here was Omnissiah's will? What you've been doing with these creatures isn't so different from what I've done with their machinery. We're probably the only two people for hundreds of light-years around who wouldn't strangle the other for their beliefs."

Jeanna laughed weakly. "That's, uh, reassuring. I think." She ran her tongue over her dry lips. "So what - what happens now? I never really thought anyone would find out, let alone be okay with it. We just go about as normal?"

"That we do. Assuming you extend the same privileges to me, at least. Some of the footage was, well..." she fanned herself theatrically. "Let's just say I had to flush my heat-sinks afterwards, hmm?"

Jeanna looked up sharply, sudden suspicion clearing away the confused fug of emotions clouding her mind. "You did? I didn't think your kind was...don't you get all that stripped away with the meat?"

"Some of us. Not very many, though. The rite of pure thought is considered extreme, even within the Mechanicus. Chem-gelding is more common, but even then it's hardly the rule. We don't lose the desire, just the means, and I still have both." Merlina grinned. "And I'm rather keen to put them to use. Do you have a suggestion? I saw you started with a pair of Tyranid bioforms."

"Um. Well. I didn't really - it wasn't really something I planned, but yes." Jeanna sat up straighter and cleared her throat. "They're relatively easy to take advantage of and pleasingly, um, vigorous. And there are two of them. So we could go together. If that's something you're interested in." She stared at Merlina for long, silent seconds, before groaning. "Throne of Terra, this is surreal. I can't believe we're just sitting here talking about - "

"About fucking aliens over a cup of recaff?"

"You don't have to put it so...you know, but...yes! Exactly!" she cried. "And you're so matter-of-fact about the idea. I almost talked myself out of it the first time."

"Because from what you've told me of your Master, he's hardly the type to encourage even the slightest deviance of thought. I, on the other hand, grew up around deviance. It's not such a big leap to go from learning to use an alien weapon for war, to using an alien itself for pleasure. Both are being broken to mankind's will, are they not?"

Jeanna nodded weakly. She'd had such thoughts herself, but hearing them come from another person still felt deeply strange. "That's true. So...so, tonight? The hormagaunts? We'll see how you handle the smaller one and if it's to your, uh, tastes, we can move on from there."

Merlina grinned widely. "Just like you did. Beautiful. I'll set a timestamp."

\---

The rest of the day passed in a blur. Jeanna had vague memories of going about her regular routine, logging autopsy reports and shuffling through maintenance files, but her mind was elsewhere. It seemed unreal - that Merlina would stumble upon her activities, accept them, and ask to join them? She was a woman of science and not given to great leaps of faith, but she found herself wondering if techpriestess' theories of divine predestination might have been true after all.

A nagging voice in the back of her head whispered that it could be a trick; an attempt to lure her into an uncompromising position, one where there could be no doubt or denial about her sordid activities. She chose to ignore it. Merlina had evidence enough of what was going on; if she intended to judge Jeanna for her actions, she would have done so already.

The anticipation was torture. Three weeks of denial did not seem like such a long time, but it had felt like an eternity. Her mind wandered constantly. Her robes were hot and stifling. There was an ache in her core, a yearning that left her trembling and feverish, and it took all her willpower not to retreat to her quarters and attempt to sooth her desires personally.

So she made what arrangements she could, moving the hormagaunts to a partitioned cell where they could be brought in one at a time and gathering pheromone samples from the female, impatiently ticking off the hours until evening. The two women avoided the issue in favour of pleasant small talk whenever they passed in the corridor, but Jeanna could see Merlina was similarly eager; her cheeks were flushed, the palm of her organic hand clammy. Jeanna fancied she could even see hunger burning in the blue glow of her optics.

Finally, the time came. An alarm chimed softly on her chrono. Jeanna gulped down a mouthful of cold recaff, took a deep breath, and strode down towards the holding pens, knowing that Merlina would already be on her way.

The techpriestess was in fact already there. She stood next to the observation window, one hand resting contemplatively on her narrow chin, watching the two aliens chitter and hiss in their metal prison.

"It feels a little sterile, don't you think?" she remarked without turning around. "Too cold. Metal has a sacred purity of its own, but this is very much an indulgence of the flesh. A little comfort would be nice."

Jeanna shrugged. "We're not exactly overburdened with soft furnishings here. Besides, imagine the stains." She pulled a face. "They would be murder to get out. We'd have to double our ration of washing water."

Merlina made a non-committal noise. She turned and gave Jeanna a sly smile. "So, then. We're here. How does this work? I saw in your files you smeared yourself with some kind of compound before entering."

"Mating pheromones, harvested from the female." Jeanna produced a handful vials from beneath her robe. "You spread them over your thighs and neck - that's where the glands are on the female - and anywhere else you want them to pay attention to."

"And then what? Assume the position and hope for the best?" Merlina raised an eyebrow. Jeanna stifled a giggle.

"Pretty much. They're incredibly simple creatures. In a way they aren't even animals - they don't have instincts, exactly, more like pre-programmed responses. Like a servitor." She patted one of the heavy-duty guard units that stood sentinel outside the pen, the pilot lights on its flamers dancing. "They detect a stimulus and react automatically. So, they smell the pheromones, and..." she cleared her throat. "Well. Away they go."

Merlina took another look into the cell. The hormagaunts were lithe creatures, whip-thin and frenetic with energy. Their black exoskeleton was glossy with lubricating fluids that oozed from beneath the crimson plates of carapace that ran down their elongated forms. They circled and snapped at each other, barbed tongues flicking from needle-fanged maws to taste the air. Moving the creatures had agitated them. They would be feisty. As eager for an outlet as the two women were.

There was an awkward pause. Jeanna and Merlina glanced at one another, fiddling with the hems of their robes.

"Oh, bugger this," Jeanna announced suddenly. She unpinned her hair and shook it out into its natural white-blond tangle, then slid her robe off and tossed the shapeless grey garment over a servitor. "Of all the times for modesty, this isn't it."

Merlina laughed and followed suit, lowering her hood and shimmying out of her own clothes. Jeanna watched out the corner of her eye, pretended to have trouble unhooking her bra. The techpriestess hadn't bothered to don undergarments. She was trim and athletic, softly defined muscles tensing beneath her pale skin as she kicked the black robe aside. Her legs were silver and brass from the knee down, giving the impression her long legs were encased in shining metal boots. Jeanna wasn't sure why that appealed to her so much.

"Here. Let me help you with that." A hand rested on Jeanna's shoulder and turned her around, while a set of cool, augmetic fingers deftly unhooked her bra and tossed it aside. Her underwear went next, dropped with a whisper. When she turned back, she found Merlina standing so close they almost touched. The techpriestess was the taller of the two. Her augmetics were lightweight and advanced. Silver armour studded with heat-sinks and uplink ports encased her ribs, linking into claw-like bands of metal which extended from a reinforced spine. Her left arm and shoulder were entirely metallic, and though her mechadendrites had been disconnected, ribbed neural uplink cables snaked from the rear of her skull, weaving through her thick, black hair like serpents.

Jeanna swallowed down a pang of anxiety. Next to the techpriestess, her slender, almost boyish figure felt utterly inadequate. Even her bionic eye was a boxy, ugly thing compared to Merlina's sleek arrangement of rotating lenses.

The techpriestess cocked her head, a sympathetic smile appearing on her lips. "For what it's worth, Jeanna, none of this is natural." She ran her organic hand down the other woman's body, coming to rest on her narrow hip. "My genetics were thoroughly edited before I was born."

Something about the other woman's touch sent a ripple of pleasure down Jeanna's spine. She felt, quite suddenly, the urge to return the gesture, to explore her in the same manner she had been exploring the strange physiologies of her alien captives. She forced the idea down hurriedly. At least until she and Merlina's relationship was more...clearly defined. Jeanna cleared her throat and handed three of the vials to her companion.

"Remember what I said. Around the - "

"The neck, thighs, and anywhere else that's important." The two women uncorked the glass tubes and went to work, smearing themselves with the greasy yellow fluid and tossing the emptied vessels aside. At a nod from Merlina, Jeanna opened the door and the two women entered the cell.

It was a bare thing like all the others, as cold and sterile as the techpriestess had noted. A small pile of rugs and cushions had been lain out for comfort. Jeanna noted with some amusement that as soon as the cell door closed and the lock clunked into place, Merlina seemed to lose some of her confidence. She sat down on one of the cushions and motioned to one of the rugs.

"Kneel down there. Hands and knees, with your behind sticking out. That's the easiest way to take them. We'll bring the smaller of the two in first. Once you're settled in nicely with him, I'll take the larger for myself." 

She obeyed, bracing herself on all fours. Jeanna grinned and ran a hand down Merlina's metal-studded back, pushing her head down a little. "Keep your ass up, at least to begin with. It'll be easier for him to mount you."

The words danced on her tongue. They felt wonderfully filthy. Jeanna grinned and leaned into Merlina's shoulder, close enough to smell the tang of sweat and machine oil coming from her skin. "Are you ready? They've been pent up for the best part of a month, and moving them to a new cell won't have done their mood any favours." She slipped a hand between her legs as she spoke, hissing in anticipation as her slender fingers brushed against her sex. "He's going to come at you hard."

The techpriestess groaned wordlessly. Her skin was flushed with need. "Damn it, woman, let him in already," she whispered harshly. "Before I change my mind."

Jeanna smirked and snapped her fingers. Turrets descended smoothly from the ceiling, tracking the partition door as it slid open. Clicking and aggressive chattering sounded from the second room as a servitor rolled in, herding the smaller of the two creatures through the opposite portal.

It bounded through with a shriek of anger, scrabbling for purchase on the floor and clashing its talons together in a threat display. It tensed down on its haunches, preparing to spring towards the door as it closed when it caught the scent. The creature turned its long head, its tongue flicking in and out, nostrils flaring. Yes, Jeanna thought, that's it. She fought down a grin as it spun towards them, something almost like recognition in its dead, black eyes. They weren't incapable of learning. They knew what the mixed scent of human and tyranid arousal meant.

The creature's organ was already hard between its legs. Thick and purple, its alien curves studded with fleshy ridges that Jeanna knew would catch and tug in the most delightful fashion. The puckered head glistened eagerly.

It stalked forwards, still sniffing the air. There was a new scent, a new mating partner, and the hormagaunt was taking time to process what this meant. It butted its nose against Merlina's thigh and dragged its tongue along her skin. The techpriestess squirmed and groaned in frustration. Jeanna ran a hand through her hair and whispered soothing noises in her ear as the hormagaunt paced and sniffed.

"Do they always take this long?" Merlina groaned. Jeanna nodded.

"The first time. They need to get your scent, and the smell of your bionics might be throwing him off. Maybe we should have used an extra - oh, wait, here we go..."

The hormagaunt seemed to make a decision. It stalked back around Merlina's prone form, its organ twitching eagerly, and pounced on her from behind. It missed its target, sliding between her buttocks and thrusting uselessly into the air. Jeanna wasn't sure whether it or Merlina's growl of frustration was the louder. She tutted under her breath and reached in, wrapping her fingers around the alien's member. It was as searingly hot and hard as she remembered, the desperate throb of vitality the same as it always had been. She held the hormagaunt steady as Merlina shuffled forwards, pushing her hindquarters higher into the air.

Jeanna licked her lips. The techpriestess' sex was wet with arousal, its lips flushed, swollen and needy. She manoeuvred the hormagaunt's cock into position and gave it a kiss for good luck, then released.

This time, it thrust straight and true, driving into Merlina's sex in a single, smooth motion. The woman let out a strangled cry and dug her fingers into the rug, her mechanical toes tensing in pleasure as the alien monster eagerly began sating its urges upon her. Jeanna lingered, unable to tear her eyes away from the sight of her lips stretching around the hormagaunt's inhuman prick. She had seen such things herself, of course, recorded from her own encounters. But to see it herself, in person...

It was beautiful. Perverse, of course. But the coupling of human beauty and alien lethality, of two utterly different bodies tethered in the most primal and instinctive manner imaginable, was nothing short of beautiful in Jeanna's eye. She moaned softly in sympathetic pleasure, her skin prickling with desire. The urge to let the second beast in and banish the memories of each pale, sad orgasm she had endured since Merlina's arrival was almost unbearable.

She choked it down. If something went wrong, or Merlina changed her mind, she needed to be ready to act. Her own mounting arousal would have to wait.

"How is he?" Jeanna asked. Merlina let out another breathless cry in response. She pushed herself up, easily taking the weight of the bucking, thrusting creature on her back.

"Oh, by the holy motive force, this is - you waited eight years before doing this?"

Jeanna snorted. "Yeah, I was kicking myself for days afterwards. But hey, plenty time to make up for it, right?" she slapped Merlina's backside playfully, the sound hard against the slick, wet sounds of the hormagaunt's frantic rutting. On a whim, Jeanna slid a hand under the other woman's body, brushing over Merlina's clit and drawing a strangled cry of ecstasy from her throat.

"That's the one drawback with these things," she said. Strings of Merlina's arousal clung to her fingers, sticky and glutinous where it had mixed with the copious amounts of precome the hormagaunt's prick must have been oozing into her. Her sex ached at the thought, the desperate need to feel what the techpriestess was feeling pressing incessantly against her thoughts. "They go deep, and they go hard, but they don't have hands or the sense to really use their tongues."

"It's quite - ah - quite sufficient from down here," Merlina gasped. The techpriestess was bucking back into each thrust now, and her lips twisted into a hungry grin as she peered out at Jeanna from beneath the lithe bioform. "Sometimes raw power is all one w-"

Merlina suddenly gave a great jerk, blurted something in machine code and expelled a cloud of damp steam from the heat sinks that lined her ribs. "Oh, holy motive force, that one went deep! And he's still going - "

She trailed off into a slur of binary, her optics spinning lazily as she came down from what Jeanna could only assume had been a truly monumental orgasm. With a satisfied smirk, she piled up a mound of tatty old cushions, nestled herself comfortably amongst them, and called for the servitors to usher the second alien through. 

The partition door rolled open once more, the squeal of old metal momentarily drowning out the lusty moans and hisses that filled the cell. The second hormagaunt was visibly larger than the first. The protective carapace encasing its athletic body was ridged with spines and old, healed wounds, while its scything foreclaws were notched and chipped with use. It was a brood leader, as much as any such thing could exist amongst the monstrous star-spawn that had birthed it, a scarred and hoary veteran with a foul disposition to match its appearance.

Jeanna adored it. Of all the creatures in her menagerie it remained her favourite, both as a lover and for the bloody amusement she gleaned from throwing useless specimens into its cell to be torn apart. I should name him, she thought idly. Her heart thumped in anticipation. 

The hormagaunt clattered in, tap-tap-tapping its claws against the deck, head raised and nostrils flared warily as it took in the scents before it. It looked towards where its smaller cousin was still busily mating with Merlina and growled, as if offended by the idea of the lesser beast being given priority. Then Jeanna whistled sharply and its attention snapped towards her, as swift and keen as a razor. Her legs were spread languidly, the pheromones glistening on her thighs in invitation.

Unlike its smaller peer, this time there was no hesitation. No rush, either. It stalked forwards, its sinuous body winding from side to side as it closed in on her, easily climbing atop the woman and sinking its talons into the cushions to either side of her. The familiar sent of it, sweet and sour and wholly inhuman, washed over her like a balm. Beads of slime glittered on its carapace like scattered jewels. It hissed in her ear and snapped at the air.

It was already hard. Jeanna could feel its cock laying on her belly, pulsing softly, spilling precome into her belly button. Her hands stroked the beast's flank, exploring every ridge and divot in its exoskeleton, drawing upwards until they cradled each side of its head. Dark, glassy eyes watched her, blank and uncomprehending, as she leaned in and kissed its armoured skull.

Jeanna lifted her hips. Her thighs parted. There was a moment of clumsiness as two creatures which were never meant to come together shifted, squirmed, and finally connected.

The hormagaunt was large, and she was tight despite the slick of arousal that clung to her nethers. The puckered tip of its cock parted her lips and drove deep, but it took a second, more vicious thrust to drive the rest of its shaft home. Its hips met her thighs with a wet slap, and Jeanna moaned in a raw and unadulterated joy that went beyond physical pleasure. How many women in the Imperium had experienced this? How many women in the galaxy? She had taken one of mankind's vilest foes and done the unthinkable; put a leash on it.

She writhed beneath the monstrous thing, one of her legs curling around the beast's slender waist and pulling it in tight against her body. Every part of the alien seemed designed to elicit some new sensation. Sculpted ribs of chitin dragged over her breasts, rough and sweet against her stiff, sensitive nipples. Its heartbeat was like the throb of a fusion reactor, fast and heavy, pounding out a ferocious rhythm against her slender body. And its prick - it seemed like such a crude thing to focus on, but it burned inside her like a star, filling without hurting, reaching deep to sooth the nameless longing her fingers and toys so utterly failed to reach.

Every stroke brought a new gasp or sob from her throat. The hormagaunt held nothing back. Each broad stroke went to the root, the puckered head driving deep along her inner walls, seeking out her deepest, most sensitive places. Ridges of hard flesh plucked and tugged at her sex. Each motion sent sparks through her aching lips, bright flashes amidst the soothing pressure of the beast's tip squirming deep in her core. Throne, Jeanna thought, how I've missed this. Three weeks had felt like an lifetime.

"I can't believe you're tak - taking that thing like a lover," Merlina called over. She had sagged forwards and peeked out at Jeanna from the pillow she had made with her arms. Whisps of steam still oozed from the heat sinks built into her ribs as her hormagaunt bore down on her from above. The rug beneath her was stained dark and her thighs glistened with pearly strings of alien come, yet the hormagaunt kept its pace, still futilely attempting to breed its human mate. "Are you going to give - mmf, that's it, right there - give him a kiss as well?"

Jeanna grinned. The hormagaunt's tongue dangled inches from her face, drooling long strings of clear spittle. She had done this before often enough, but the perversity of such an act never failed to elicit a wicked thrill. Her lips wrapped tight, her own tongue dancing and flicking against the writhing appendage, the bitter-salt taste of its saliva flooding her mouth. She crept upwards, a little at a time, only relenting once the hormagaunt's needling fangs flashed inches away from her nose.

Merlina made a strangled noise, both appalled and impressed. "That - that is, perhaps, a little to far for - for me just yet."

"If you're - if you're going to indulge like this - " Jeanna's head was spinning. It was difficult to speak. The air fled her lungs each time the hormagaunt rutted into her, her silken walls clenching tight around the alien's prick, eager for the rush of its seed. She was close to coming. "Don't hold back. Do - do everything. Own it like we o-own them." She glanced over at Merlina, catching the look in the woman's augmetic eyes. "They belong to us. Ev-everything we do is for o-our p-pleasure. So nothing we do can be con-cons-considered an act of submission before the alien."

She held out a hand. Her breath came in raw pants. Her body was aflame with desire, from the tingling of her skin to the raw ache of her breasts, the sensory madness of the hormagaunt's hisses and screeches to the heavy knot of ecstasy that was swelling inside her. She felt herself being drawn tighter with each delightful thrust, her pale, slender form shuddering with the need for release. But not yet. Not yet.

The hormagaunt had no such compunctions. It bore down on her like an avalanche, throwing its head back and ejaculating with a triumphant screech. Ropes of alien seed lashed against Jeanna's walls, burning and soothing in equal measure, flowing into her depths and squirting through the seal made by the beast's cock. It tingled on her sex, dripping down her backside, pooling beneath her. Her eyes crossed and she moaned in delight, dancing on the edge of oblivion.

But not yet. She needed to feel - 

There! Merlina's hand in hers, steel fingers knotting around her own flesh and blood. They two women made eye contact and in that moment Jeanna knew there was no trick, no long game being played by the techpriestess. They shared the same needs. The same urges.

Something in Jeanna gave way. She peaked at last, every muscle in her body drawing tight before falling slack as wave after wave of crushing pleasure sweeping through her. She clung to the alien, losing herself in its rasping breaths, letting her mind dissolve into the sensory hurricane as it tore through her.

And then it was gone - or, not gone, but fading, taking the half-remembered nights of frustration and dissatisfaction with them. Merlina's hormagaunt had already withdrawn, stalking around her like a panther observing its prey. Jeanna's beast tugged itself free with a wet sucking noise and clacked over to join it. Both creatures were still hard, their organs twitching, drooling.

Merlina gave Jeanna a few moments to catch her breath, then nudged the xenoarchivist from her blissful stupor. "Is that is?" she whispered. "Do we leave now? Is there a risk of them turning on us?"

Jeanna mumbled something under her breath and looked up, pushing her lank hair away from her face. She swallowed and grinned.

"There was a first. But you see that? They're still in the mood. So long as they can keep going, we're in no danger. I mean...you could go. If you'd had enough."

The words hung in the air, their challenge clear. Merlina rolled over and sat up, her lenses shifting and realigning thoughtfully. Finally, her lips pulled into a broad, lusty smile.

"No, I think I could go on a little more," she replied.

In the end, it went on longer than Jeanna had expected. She knew the pheromone must have worn off, but the hormagaunts didn't seem to care. Perhaps their dim brains had come to connect the scent of human arousal with sex as much as the musk of their own race, or perhaps they had entered a mating frenzy so potent they would have set upon anything available no matter what. But they came, and came, and did not stop, always demanding more.

Jeanna showed Merlina how to sate them with her lips, by holding the base of the shaft and sucking gently upon the gnarled head, for no reason other than the ironic pleasure of giving to such monsters without receiving in return. She held the techpriest down as the larger mated her from the top, as it had done with her, stroking her fingers through the other woman's hair as the beast flooded her with its seed. They had knelt face to face, fingers linked and bodies pressed against one another, each with a bucking monster weighing on their backs. And once, as one hormagaunt took her from the rear and another enjoyed Merlina's lips, she found herself on her hands and knees with her head between Merlina's thighs, licking the mixture of come and arousal from her sex as the other woman shuddered in climax.

It was bliss, but it was more than that. It was celebratory. A triumphant declaration of man's (or, perhaps, woman's) superiority over alien, of the open-minded radical over the hidebound and inflexible puritan, of the desire to understand over the need to destroy. Hours later, when the two tyranid monsters were finally spent, Jeanna and Merlina had staggered out of the cell, supporting one another's weight and slathered from head to toe in sweat and glistening fluids. There were no words; they were beyond that, so riven with mental and physical exhaustion they could barely stand. But as they caught their breath in the rattling deck-elevator ferrying them to Antimedes' washrooms, there was a brief kiss, their lips connected by a string of pearly alien seed. 

\---

Knowing glances over breakfast. A flutter of eyelashes in the corridor. The occasional flash of thigh while bending over a surgical bench.

Jeanna had always been a sexual woman. A degree of libidinous behaviour was accepted, and even encouraged, on her homeworld, where it was seen as a sign of robust health and strong character. She had sought relief in brief flings with the pilot who brought her fresh supplies, in a stash of erotic literature, and eventually in the creatures she was supposed to be studying. She never thought she would seek it in another woman. And yet with Merlina, she had.

They were something more than friends, but less than sworn partners. With the techpriestess on her station, Jeanna finally had a companion, a friend, and a peer with which to spend her time. The pace at which she was able to perform her research accelerated dramatically, thanks both to the other woman's input and the simple effect of having another person around to lift her spirits.

And at night when the autopsy reports were filed and the knives neatly put away, they were all fingers and tongues, their breathless cries mixing with the hisses and roars of their charges. One day, as they lay sprawled across the low benches in Jeanna's office, Merlina raised an idea.

"Do you remember," she said, "when I first washed up here, you called me a pirate?"

"I do," Jeanna replied. Her voice was light with amusement. "You were rather enthusiastic in your denials. You were, I believe, an "unsanctioned acquisitioner". With the full backing of your synod, of course."

Merlina inclined her head, accepting the gentle jibe with grace. "Which was the simple truth. But in my line of work, I came to have dealings with a number of individuals who might be described as pirates. Techno-scavengers, free traders, rogue privateers and mercenary ships."

She plucked a datapad from an arm of the couch and plugged it into one of her dangling neural links. Tiny lines of green text scrolled through her occular lenses. "It occurred to me that, if we were to boost Antimedes' long-range communicators and mask our astropath's signal, we might be able to reach out to them."

Jeanna stirred, a curious frown passing over her face. "To what end? The more people find their way here, the more we run the risk of being uncovered by someone less tolerant of our..." she trailed off for a second. "Of our happy state of existence here."

"You've said it yourself, though. Even with the Lux's rations and the new hydroponics lab, eating for two means we'll run out of food before long. If we can set up a pirate trade route, maybe allow limited docking time at the station, we can start bringing in more resources. There are grey markets that will pay handsomely for xenos carcasses, even dissected ones."

Jeanna frowned. It made sense, but the idea of allowing other people on her station set her teeth on edge. Merlina seemed to read her thoughts and smiled slyly.

"It would also serve as a new source of specimens. Unless, of course, you're happy with the handful of odds and ends Railey sends you every year? I know a man, Vorcus, who can provide them on order if the price is right."

That got her attention. Jeanna sat up, looking thoughtfully towards her companion. Eventually she spoke.

"Alright," she said. "Tell me more."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written July 2019


	3. The Freak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Jeanna's isolation was simply physical, Merlina Kesh has struggled with a different kind of loneliness for her entire life. After being unhappily reminded of her status as an outsider among both the Mechanicus and the wider Imperium, she seeks a moment's solace with her favourite pet.

The "Cold Trade", as any student of Imperial trans-sector law will tell you, refers to the illegal trade of aliens and their technology, whole or in part, living or dead. While the term originated in the Calixis Sector and has since been obfuscated by hundreds of other terms to throw off Imperial authorities, it nevertheless spread quickly and became the de-facto manner in which the pirates, smugglers, and black-marketeers who operate such trade describe their work.

It was a market Merlina Kesh was intimately aware of. She had spent the bulk of her career working the Cold Trade for her masters on the Forge World of Stygies VIII, combing riotous underworld markets for knew specimens of interest to the Xenarites who dominated Stygies tech-synod. It had been a thankless role, one only given to those Techpriests the synod deemed disposable enough they could be cut loose in an instant should they fall foul of the Arbites or, worse, the dreaded Inquisition.

But then, Merlina thought bitterly, that described her perfectly. She sat in Antimedes' cavernous primary docking bay, perched daintily on the edge of an ancient dust-covered transit crate, staring at the elegant silver-and-brass augmetic which replaced her right arm. The techpriestess slowly clenched and unclenched her fist, watching the tiny, delicate servos in her palm spin and buzz in the silence.

She hated it.

She hated how human it looked. 

If there was one unifying philosophy which bound the Omnissiah's squabbling children together it was their dedication towards abandonment of the flesh; to rebuild themselves, set by step, free from the weakness and inefficiency of their organic bodies. The most holy of their number had all but abandoned the human form altogether, transforming themselves into towering demigods of steel and iron, striding forth on brutal piston-driven limbs, their faces hidden behind skull-shaped rebreathers, defended by implanted weapons of terrible power and swathed in cloaks of lashing mechadendrites.

Such was the ultimate goal of all who walked in the Machine God's shadow, and such had been forever denied to her. Her creator had seen to that.

There was a crackle in her ear. Merlina jumped and shook her head, pushing away the last few dour thoughts as Jeanna's voice hissed over the vox. 

"That's confirmation from the Orano's Blessing, they're on final approach. Their shuttle should be ready to dock in ten. Is everything ready down there?"

The spidery clusters of revolving lenses which had replaced Merlina's eyes clicked and span, shifting rapidly through different wavelengths and magnification levels. Info-readouts spooled down the left side of her peripheral vision, feeding her with an unfolding list of data harvested from her surroundings. A dozen servitors clattered around the deck. Some prepared fuel lines and magnoclamps, or stood ready with cargo pallets. Others trained implanted bolters and flamers on the single landing pad which Merlina had cleared in the centre of the chamber. Beyond them cracked and cobwebbed hazard lights began to flash and spin, painting the immense, rust-clad airlock doors with strobes of vivid orange.

"As we'll ever be. Give them the approach codes."

There was a moment of silence before Jeanna spoke again. "Done. They're incoming now, I can see the shuttle on our exterior augers."

Merlina hopped down from her crate and walked over to the landing pad, crossing her hands neatly behind her back. She could sense Jeanna working in the command centre, slowly waking the station's ancient Machine Spirits. They were stubborn and resentful things, bitter at long decades of abandonment and misuse, and the techpriestess soon felt them pressing angrily around the edges of her noospheric link. Unperturbed she began to sing a prayer, her soft voice filling the hollow chamber even as her thought-engrams and placating datapulses quelled one unquiet spirit after another.

Soon the last of them relented, abandoning its interrogations and sinking back into dormancy. Merlina allowed herself a little pride at that. No matter who - no matter what she was, she remained as skilled a techno-savant as any to come from Stygies' shadowed halls. 

The airlock doors ground open with a squeal of tortured metal. Through them came the squat, pug-nosed form of an Arvus lighter, its stubby manoeuvring fins twitching as it wallowed into the landing bay. A flight of servo-skulls flocked around the shuttle like crows, trailing lamps and detection-streamers as they guided it down towards the landing pad. Merlina stepped elegantly backwards, her hood blowing down and short, nearly clipped black hair whirling around her head from the engine backdraught as it lumbered around and finally clunked heavily onto the deck.

A landing ramp descended, followed by half a dozen rough men clad in patched voidsuits, armoured with savaged flakboard and chainweave mail and carrying brutish naval shotguns. They eyed the gun-servitors warily as the lobotomised cyborgs tracked their movements, falling into a rough semi-circle around a seventh figure who descended after them. Hunched and wizened with age, his wargear emblazoned with a jade death's-head emblem, he peered suspiciously around himself as Merlina approached.

"You Kesh?" He asked. Merlina nodded.

"I am. You have the wares we spoke of?"

"We do. Thought there was another one of yer?"

Merlina's smile was bland and carefully composed, betraying nothing. "She is currently indisposed. This station is old, as you can tell, and it requires a great deal of monitoring to remain functional. You will deal exclusively with me."

She made no mention of Jeanna's anxieties; that after nearly a decade of isolation the xenoarchivist had baulked at coming face to face with a squad of heavily armed pirates and chosen to remain sequestered in the command centre. Servo-skulls flitted though the shadows, as if Jeanna sought to remind her she was still watching from afar.

The pirate captain's name was Kalides. After her long stint in stasis, Merlina had discovered most of her old contacts were dead, either from old age, internecine fighting, or the heavy hand of Imperial justice. Few of them had been anything like friends, but they had been reliable and trustworthy. With their passing one of her few tangible connections to the rest of humanity had been cut, and she had been forced to reach out towards less scrupulous captains in search of supplies.

Kalides' gaze lingered on the techpriestess for a moment. Merlina stood still, her skin crawling as the man's watery eyes swept along her elegant figure, lingering on the small, pleasant curves of her hip and bust, before flicking away as he met the woman's lens-clusters. 

More figures emerged from the shuttle at his curt gesture, dragging a clutch of strange, arachnid creatures behind them. Each was muzzled and bound in heavy iron shackles, half again the size of man, armoured with mottled brown carapace and sporting truncated stubs where their wings had been torn away. Jagged proboscises flexed and their eight round, black eyes glittered miserably under the bay's harsh lumins.

"Q'orl?" Jeanna's voice buzzed excitedly in her ear. "No, wait. Only their warbeasts, not the principle creatures themselves. Unfortunate. Still, they'll do for our causes."

The pirates eyed Merlina suspiciously as she swept past them, examining the spindly aliens. Their carapace was blackened from where shock-mauls had been used to keep them in line and brittle from malnourishment, but otherwise the creatures seemed in good health. Though hardly the prize she had been promised, Merlina was quite sure Jeanna would find all manner of interesting things to do with them. Her taste for the strange and inhuman had only deepened in the short time she had known her.

Kalides himself, unfortunately, was infinitely less interesting and unsurprisingly tiresome to deal with. Though her habitual bland smile didn't waver for a moment throughout the negotiations, Merlina felt her remaining skin crawl under the dirty little man's watery eyes. Only once did he meet the revolving lens-clusters which studded her augmetic features; beyond that his gaze flitted nervously here and there, drawn to the slim curves beneath her robes only to be repulsed in turn by the eerie sleekness of her bionics. His men were much the same, muttering crudely to one another in the background. 

Wondering if she still had 'the important bits'. Wondering if she could still feel anything. Wondering where her augmetics had come from.

As if she couldn't hear.

By the time they were done she felt somehow dirty, as soiled by their lascivious whispers as she was by their unease over her augmetics. The feeling had grown, second by second and minute by minute, throughout the negotiations, until her chest was tight and heavy with disgust and self-loathing. In the end they took a dozen newly-laid hormagaunt eggs in exchange for four of the Q'orl and two months worth of Militarum ration packs, leaving Merlina alone in the hanger once more.

She wanted to scream.

She wanted tear at herself, to mar her artificially-whitened flesh and smash her ornate bionics until she was as stunted and scarred and ugly as they had been. 

She wanted to be normal.

The Q'orl clicked and shivered as they were marched away by the servitors. Merlina could hear Jeanna talking excitedly at her over the vox, already discussing her plans for where the aliens were to be housed and what treatments would quickly bring them back to full health.

After a moment, the xenoarchivist trailed off. "Mer?" she asked, her concern audible even over the hissing voxbead. "Mer, are you okay?"

Merlina's eyes clicked and cycled. Her smile was resolute and utterly hollow.

"Of course, Jeanna. I'll see the new specimens to their cells then rejoin you shortly."

She glanced down into her palm again, then disconnected the voxbead and returned to her duties in silence.

\---

Merlina remained quiet and withdrawn for the rest of the day. She avoided her friend wherever possible, and once the Q'orl were settled vanished into Antimedes' crumbling lower decks. There she lost herself for some time in the comforting routine of repairs and upgrades she had suggested, harvesting components from the Lux Astra Aeterna's floating corpse and using them to turn the station's wealth of empty chambers into workable spaces. Already the station boasted new laboratories, vivisectorums, and hydroponics facilities, each transplanted piece by piece from her dead ship into her new home.

But by the time Antimides' chronologs registered the beginning of a new rest cycle, her unhappiness had returned. She shared dinner with Jeanna, concealing her simmering unease as the two women ate, then departed to the small living quarters she had claimed for herself. There she had lain on her pallet bed, tossing and turning as the day's events wormed insidiously through her mind like toxic scrapcode. 

Meditation did little to clear her thoughts. Binharic prayer failed likewise, as did...less wholesome methods of distraction. Finally, tense and frustrated and desperate for some sense of companionship, Merlina rose from her cot and began to pace Antimedes' cold, silent halls. For a time she was content to wander, searching for anything to occupy her mind, until she came at last to a small cell. It was a temporary housing unit used to contain xenoforms as their primary enclosures were cleaned and maintained, though it often found double duty as a playroom where she and Jeanna could indulge their particular tastes.

This one, she knew, contained one of the station's two male hormagaunts. She drummed her fingers on the metal door, as if to muster her courage, then keyed it open and slipped inside like a ghost. 

She and Jeanna had done this often enough before. The old precautions which had once complicated their indulgences had, in the long run, proven unnecessary. No gun-servitors took up station inside, no auto-turrets glared down from above as she shrugged off her black robes and sent a noospheric pulse to the lumins, awakening them to half-strength. Dim light flooded the near side of the chamber, illuminating bare, silver-scrubbed metal and a battered divan salvaged from the Lux piled invitingly along the wall. 

Merlina paused for a moment, there in the dark. Kalides swam back into her thoughts; his drooping face, the ugly beard which clung to his chin like fungus, the revulsion and lust warring in his eyes. It was the same expression she had seen a thousand times on a thousand different faces before, whether worn openly or concealed behind a mask of thin courtesy. 

She was beautiful, yes, but it was a false, sterile beauty, the product of a mind which thought art could be rendered down into a series of precise ratios and equations. Her features were too delicate and finely-boned, her figure too tall and elegant to be wholly natural. It gave her the countenance of a porcelain doll or an artist's figurine, something only reinforced by her artificially whitened skin and dyed red lips.

Merlina Kesh had not been born; she had been grown. Extensively gene-edited and modified in her nutrient-womb, her first waking memories were of being hacked apart and fitted with her augmentations. But even those were wrong; where most Imperial cybernetics were brutal things which exalted the holy form of the machine, hers were slim, proportionate, almost alien. She was neither one thing nor another, a perfect, flawless freak, and her master had discarded her as such when his artistic pretensions drew nothing but scorn.

A soft rattle echoed from somewhere deeper within the cell, shaking the techpriestess from her morose thoughts. Merlina answered it in kind, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth and smiling mirthlessly as the alien within began to stir. Its compatriot was elsewhere; Jeanna had put the second creature out to stud with the female earlier, so they might have another batch of eggs for sale. 

This one, then, was hers alone. Merlina prayed silently to the Omnissiah that it would be enough. She sat daintily on the edge of the divaan, her pale thighs spread, her lips already flushed and glimmering where she had struggled to distract herself earlier. Jeanna, perhaps, could have helped; the other woman was a clumsy if enthusiastic lover, but Merlina decided it would have been cruel to wake her. Not when Antimedes provided a wealth of alternatives.

As if called by that very thought, the hormagaunt slunk out of the darkness, its hooves clicking on the bare metal with every step. 

The sight of it never failed to take Merlina's breath away. Amidst all the creatures in Jeanna's collection, she understood perfectly why the hormagaunts were her favourites. It was a whiplike thing of lean, sinewy elegance, its movements utterly inhuman and filled with predatory intent. Old scars and bullet wounds marred its waxy red carapace, and its chitinous black body glistened wetly as it approached. A long tail dragged behind, swishing lazily too and fro as the beast shook off the last vestiges of sleep. 

It was beautiful, Merlina thought. It was everything she was not - something pure and whole, flawlessly created to fulfil its allotted tasks, incapable of doubt or shame or self-pity. That it was a feral, near-mindless alien was irrelevant. It was perfect, and the sight of it crouched before her was enough to set her heart racing and rekindle her dim sparks of arousal into something far more potent. The hormagaunt took a cautious step forwards, its scent-pits trembling in curiosity. Further back, beneath its coiled hind legs, Merlina spied the tip of its dripping phallus beginning to emerge.

Once, when Jeanna had first began her indulgences with the captive tyranids, she had been forced to use vials of breeding pheromones to excite their interest. Neither she nor Merlina had anticipated the simple-minded aliens would eventually learn to identify their scents as that of breeding partners and broodmates. The xenoarchivist had already written several essays theorising ways in which tyranid organisms could be controlled or manipulated if bonded to human partners, but for Merlina, the implication was far more intimate.

The techpriestess let out a soft groan and reached down, running steel fingers over her sex. She was wet - she was so wet, so desperate, stringy beads of arousal clinging to her pale lips and dripping in long strings from her probing digits. Her legs parted wider, her fingers dipped deeper into her heat, reaching upwards and stroking indulgently along her most sensitive places, finally rewarding her with a soft curl of pleasure as she noticed the beast's cock was almost fully engorged.

"That's it," she whispered, "that's right. I'm ready for you."

The beast accepted her. It didn't love, or care, but neither did it judge or fear her. That was the joy of it - the blind acceptance it offered, and the sweet oblivion she found in its hooked, razor-clawed embrace. 

The hormagaunt sat for a few moments longer, its dead, void-black eyes watching her with alien hunger. Then, with a sibilant hiss, it pounced.

Merlina let out a brief yelp of surprise as the hormagaunt leapt forwards, its clawed limbs flailing as it sought to anchor itself for mating. Talons whickered through the air, screeching and sparking against the metal walls, before the alien hooked them around the back of the divan and dragged itself into position. The techpriestess' cry of alarm melted into a deep, lusty moan as she felt the alien's body grinding atop her own, its lithe, muscular weight bearing her down into the ragged couch beneath them.

As practised as she and Jeanna were, the harsh reality was that neither she nor the hormagaunt were designed for mating with one another. The beast's phallus throbbed against her stomach, already leaking precome, painting her smooth belly with a warm, slick sheen as it struggled to find her entrance. It was a torment she and Jeanna had experienced before - the xenoarchivist even coyly referred to the familiar struggle as 'dancing' - but on this night Merlina found she had no patience for it. 

The techpriestess moaned again and dragged her body further up the divan, spreading her legs all the wider in the hopes of giving the beast an easier target. Pleasure crashed through her as the hormagaunt's rough, chitin-sheathed ribs dragged across her tender nipples, raw and bright, sweeping the pale spasms her fingers had brought forth away like ash from a hot forge. 

Merlina's breathing grew ragged as she desperately squirmed beneath the alien, giving voice to a sob of anticipation as the two mismatched bodies fought to align themselves. Her sex pulsed as the hormagaunt's phallus slid wetly along her buttock before thrusting into the crook of her thigh, an aching, soul-deep throb of need so intense it was almost painful. Panting and feverish, Merlina hugged the alien close and whined soft pleas into its chorded neck. She guided it as best she could, trying to shift her hips as it stabbed left and right, hissing and rattling with a frustration seemingly even greater than her own.

Finally, beautifully, it struck true. The puckered phallus slithered over Merlina's sopping lips, glanced inwards and plunged smoothly into the writhing woman. Waves of ecstasy bloomed out between her legs as the hormagaunt drove itself deeper, the first, savage thrust so intense she felt ready to faint. The alien's tongue lolled out in mutual pleasure as the techpriestess' silky passage clenched tight, eagerly welcoming the gnarled, thickly-ridged shaft into her slender body.

There was a heartbeat's pause, barely long enough for Merlina to catch her breath. The hormagaunt's first thrust, for all its heady intensity, had been shallow; only half the alien's cock had made it inside her. It was an error it seemed all too eager to correct. Merlina stroked its face as it began fucking her in earnest, softly kissing the beast's forehead as its motions became faster and deeper, more frenzied and aggressive, each thrust feeding another inch of its rampant prick into Merlina's slender form.

Soon it was taking her down to the root, its rough, sandpapery hips slapping against Merlina's prone body as she moaned and cried out for more. The ridges which sheathed its organ rubbed across her walls, stretching and caressing her in ways no human could ever have done. The ocular lenses which clustered across her silver half-mask clicked and spun, focusing on the bucking, drooling alien atop her, bringing it into sharp relief even as her mind grew hazy and drunk with pleasure. She wanted to see everything - to feel everything, to delight in every muscular buck and obliviating shiver as she was mated.

The techpriestess had been with men before, of course; sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for duty. But such occurrences had been tainted things, ultimately unsatisfying and poisoned by the effect of her eerie, doll-like features upon her partners. But the hormagaunt showed no such squeamishness. It gave her no respite, fucking her all the harder as she shuddered and moaned beneath its whip-thin form, venting its feral lusts upon the slender, silver-clad creature it had taken as its broodmate. Its tongue ran along her neck and across her face, thick beads of saliva dripping from its bared fangs to soak deep into her black hair.

Merlina's only response was to give voice to a hitching laugh and wrap her legs around the alien's narrow hips, pale thighs locking tight and pulling it deeper into her core, shamelessly encouraging own impalement. It was better face-to-face, she thought. Despite every logical argument she found there was nothing quite like being able to see the creature she was mating with. It made the reality of what she was doing inescapable; forced her to own what she was doing, to look into the glassy, black eye of such a monstrous being and see nothing but her own lusts reflected back.

It completed her, she realised. Merlina had never believed her arrival on Antimedes was an accident. For years, she had served the tech-lords of Stygies VIII with quiet devotion, hiding her sense of isolation and anxiety behind the bland smile which had become as much a part of her face as the lens-clusters which replaced her eyes. But every sleep-cycle had been ended with a prayer to Omnissiah for something - anything - which would make her feel whole, and as far as the techpriestess was concerned, her deity had finally answered.  
The hormagaunt's prick throbbed inside her, hot and hard between her slick folds. Its gnarled head rubbed incessantly against her deepest and most sensitive places, raging against the loving prison that held it tight. Merlina Kesh felt her climax growing, felt the slippery pulse as the feral alien poured its precome into her, and felt whole.

And so she took everything it offered and begged for more, even as the hormagaunt hooked its secondary limbs over her shoulders and dragged itself into a hideous parody of an embrace. Her hands - one flesh and blood, one steel and brass - roved over its lithe form, stroking the hard angles of its exoskeleton, tracing chitinous ribs and feeling the alien heartbeat raging beneath. Whisps of steam leaked from the heat-sinks implanted along her ribs. Her peak was close, ecstasy humming along her augmented nerves like pulses of divine feedback, and she reached for it like a seeker upon the edge of enlightenment. 

Merlina's body burned. It crackled. Each thrust brought her closer, each rattling hiss and lusty screech from her monstrous paramour feeding into her growing orgasm like prometheum upon a blaze. She whispered encouragement to the bladed horror as it rutted into her, wallowing in the sweet-sour alien stink and the clammy touch of its sweat and slime upon her limbs and chest, nursing the rampant beast closer to its orgasm even as she spiralled madly into her own.

It struck her like a blow from a forge-hammer, blasting the air from her lungs, the thoughts from her mind, hollowing her out and leaving nothing but ecstasy in its wake. Merlina gave one last passionate cry and hugged the alien close, silky walls clenching hard around the hormagaunt's prick as it began to spasm and jerk and come inside her. The tyranid let out a thin shriek as it found its own release, driving its shaft as deep into its mate's warmth as it could and flooding her with pulse after pulse of thick, sticky alien semen.

The techpriestess' legs shuddered around the hormagaunt's narrow hips, keeping it pinned helplessly in place as it emptied itself into her. Stinging notes of pleasure danced along her augmented nerves as it jerked back and forth, grinding in place and tormenting her aching nipples with its rough chest. It was only when Merlina was sure the very last drop had been poured into her flushed, sweat-slick body that she allowed herself to relax, falling slack and allowing the hormagaunt to wriggle free. 

She lay there for some time, panting heavily, feeling the beast's seed drip slowly from her sex in long, burning strings with a drunken smile on her face. For a few precious moments, nothing mattered. Not the unnatural feel of her cyborg limbs, not the fading memories of the revulsion she had seen in the pirate's eyes. She felt whole. Complete. The hormagaunt had retreated back to the shadows, curling in upon itself and diligently licking itself clean, blissfully unconcerned of its partner's woes.

It almost seemed rude to leave the creature to it. Merlina slid from the couch in a boneless heap and crawled over to the prone alien, gently running her steel hand over its wiry thigh before reaching between its legs. The hormagaunt raised its head and let out a long hiss, but made no effort to dissuade the techpriestess from ducking closer and taking its cock gently between her lips. Her tongue played over its gnarled head as she slid down the shaft, nursing the beast back to full hardness as she cleaned away the sticky residue of their congress. One of its legs kicked haplessly at the air as she sucked, selflessly pleasuring the feral monster until it shook, tensed, and released another thick pulse of semen into Merlina's loving mouth.

Finally she withdrew, her soft lips caressing the hormagaunt's phallus one last time. Merlina wiped away a few stubborn drops of alien come from her lips, licked them clean and swallowed, briefly allowing her optics to blur out of focus as she savoured the mouthful of warm, glutinous come curling down into her belly. No, she thought distantly. Chasing after the sort of star-scum to come washing out of the great rift would do them no good. Even those who could stand to deal with her would always be unreliable - too prone to turning on them or selling the pair out to the Inquisition. But there were other traders out there she and Jeanna could deal with. Creatures less squeamish than most humans could ever be, with a record of clandestine trade with those Imperial forces willing to take their business.

She pulled herself to her feet with a satisfied groan, leaning against the battered divan until her legs were strong enough to stand. When the last of the shakes had faded, she slung her robes around her shoulders and limped wearily from the hormagaunt's cell. A thin trail of pearly fluid marked her way, dripping down her legs to lie upon Antimedes' rusting deck, unseen and ignored as the techpriestess' enhanced mind lit up with plans and possibilities.

Eldar. Stryxis. Sslyth. She thought for a moment about a snippet of proscribed work she had stumbled across, the remains of a centuries-old autopsy report buried deep within Antimedes' antique cogitator core.

I have touched the face of the divine, it had said. And it is not human.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written July 2020.


	4. The Show

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When one of Jeanna's new trading partners catches onto her covert activities, she approaches the mistress of Antimedes Station with an interesting, and highly profitable, proposition - the hosting of a live sex show involving her captive aliens.

It had been a good day, Jeanna thought. 

She stood in Antimedes' primary landing bay, absent-mindedly scrolling through a long list of the day's takings on a battered old handheld dataslate. Less than an hour ago the chamber had been a riot of human and alien voices, all shouting, screaming, haggling, and in some cases pleading in their desperation to be heard over their neighbours. Rough men and women in purloined flak had sold writhing Loxatl young from briny tanks as jewel-scaled Sslyth merchants exchanged xeno-derived narcotics with lumpen Stryxis arms dealers. Slaves from a dozen species and a hundred worlds were dragged out in chains to be inspected, questioned, rejected and in some cases even purchased. Weapons dangerous enough to earn their bearers a kill-on-sight order in Imperial space were carried openly. 

Jeanna had bustled through it all, thin-lipped and hard-faced, breaking up fights, directing newcomers, and above all else collecting tithes from the pirates and merchantmen who came to trade at Antimedes. Any pretence that the station still functioned as an Inquisitorial research outpost had long since fallen by the wayside. With no supplies arriving and no messages from her master, necessity had wed itself to desire and forced Jeanna to plunge head first into the Cold Trade. Slowly but surely, Antimedes had established itself as a black market trading hub, a place where humans and aliens alike could mingle on mostly-equitable terms.

It hadn't been an easy change. After nearly a decade of isolation, having to deal with so many people on such a regular basis had left the xenoarchivist a nervous wreck, hiding in her chambers while Merlina acted as the face of the operation. But once the shock had worn off, the role of the xenophillious market-queen had settled quite naturally upon Jeanna's shoulders. She was strict, no-nonsense, fair in her dealings and ruthless at dealing with those who broke her strict no-violence policies.

But trading hours had ended for the day, and the pleasing hustle and bustle of the market had vanished. In its place came the deafening screech of shuttles firing their engines and the monotonous dirge-drone of monotask servitors refuelling and repairing those vessels yet to return to their ships, or else dragging her latest haul of alien curiosities deeper into Antimedes for study and storage. For the first time in months - no, Jeanna corrected herself, years - the station was actually running at a profit. It could be a healthier profit, true. There were months where she and Merlina found themselves scrimping for supplies, or desperately bodging the ancient station's internal systems back into good order with second-rate components. But all things considered, Jeanna considered herself blessed.

So, yes. A good day, she thought.

Soon only one shuttle remained, a predatory gun-cutter which squatted at the far end of the hanger like a predator waiting to pounce. Servitors circled it mindlessly, dribbling fuel-hoses and rusting clamp-releases clasped in their lumpen hands. An error message pinged on Jeanna's dataslate; she dismissed it with an irritated gesture, only to look up as a second, then a third, flashed across the device's fuzzy screen. A handful of the cutter's occupants lounged around its ebon hull, idly waving the servitors away each time they attempted to prep it for departure. Yoked to Jeanna's authority, the lobotomised slave-creatures stumbled back and forth, as unable to abandon their task as they were helpless to prevent the crewmen from interfering.

Jeanna sighed and tucked her dataslate into her robes. Four more servitors fell into step as she strode across the echoing hanger, the massive heavy bolters carried by two tracking the bored gaggle of men as she closed in. An imperious wave of the hand called a servo-skull down from the rafters and synced its vox-hailer to her microbead.

"Problem, gentlemen?" Jeanna called, her voice amplified magnificently by the hovering drone. The men jumped and scattered, a handful reaching for their sidearms on instinct before catching sight of the lumbering gun-servitors. "This is the..." she frowned. "The Midnight Lady, yes? You should have departed twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds ago, what's the hold-up?"

One of the men jerked his thumb back towards the vessel. "Er, captain wanted a word with you, ma'am. Private-like."

"It's alright, Hencs, I can speak for myself," a second voice called out from inside the cutter, as rich and sweet as dark treacle. The woman who appeared at the top of its ramp was tall and solidly built, dressed in a frayed naval longcoat and studded leather brazier, and sported an impressive nest of dark braids which wound around her shoulders like serpents. She grinned at Jeanna's sour expression, teeth flashing white against skin the colour of burned cocoa.

"Oh, come on, J, don't look at me like that. Wouldn't be wasting your time like this if it wasn't important. Now that the, uh, the riff-raff is out of the way - " she jerked her thumb towards the landing bay's rusted airlock - "I got a proposition. Your ears only, mm?"

"Raverii." Jeanna sighed, briefly rubbing the bridge of her nose. The woman was known to her - indeed, she doubted anyone who ever met the bellicose pirate would ever forget the experience. She was a good trader, reliable and with access to a wide network of contacts that Jeanna had made use of in the past, but loud. Very, very loud. And infuriatingly overfamiliar. "I've told you not to call me 'Jay' before."

"And I've ignored you before as well. Come on." Raverii stepped backwards, gesturing extravagantly towards the gun-cutter's boarding ramp. "Step into my parlour. You'll see why I didn't want the dross filling up your hanger catching wind."

The cutter was larger than most shuttles, almost big enough to serve as a system ship unto itself. Bunks for half a dozen men ran alongside a cargo hold spacious enough to hold a chained Carnifex, but Raverii swept past them all, brushing Jeanna's questions aside until they reached her private chambers. They were far more lavishly appointed than one might have been expected - a personal vid-screen had been mounted on one wall, which in turn had been panelled with what looked like real wood. Raverii kicked a seat around for Jeanna and flopped down on the end of her bed, grinning with excitement.

"Alright, so, you're probably asking yourself, 'J, why oh why has my dear friend and esteemed astronautical colleague dragged me into her bunk if not for a little pre-parting fun, eh? Well, you remember our last transaction, right?"

"Of course." Jeanna winced and lowered herself into the seat as the pirate continued to smirk. "It was purely a data transaction. Fra'al migratory and behavioural analysis in return for records describing movement patterns of Hive Fleet Scylla's theta-12 tendril."

"Uh-huh. And very useful it was too." Raverii nodded. "Only, you packaged something else along with it. S'a good thing I like to double-check, or it'd have ended up passed along to my client along with the data."

There was no reply. Jeanna sat, frozen in place, forcing an expression of blank disinterest. She had a horrible idea of where this was going.

"D'you want to see what it was?" the pirate continued.

"I rather think I had better."

Raverii fished around under her bunk before pulling out a control wand and stabbing it triumphantly at the vidscreen. It hissed and sputtered, the picture flickering like a child's picture-show before slowly resolving itself into a grainy image of a metal cell. In its centre, lying on a heap of old cushions, Jeanna could make out Merlina's slender body, pinned underneath the spidery form of a Q'orl warbeast. It was fucking her with rapid, uneven strokes, mandibles tangled in her hair, the techpriestess' hands wrapped tightly around its chitinous forelimbs as she rocked back and forth in obvious pleasure. Two more of the creatures sat in the corner of the chamber, their ovipositors dripping clear fluid as they waited their turn.

Jeanna's blood ran cold. Antimedes' central cogitator was old and prone to errors. It had suffered a terminal crash some three weeks ago, forcing Merlina to reboot and reconstruct its datacores. Not all of their data had been salvageable. Some, based on the scraps in the registry, had been deleted. Others had simply vanished. 

This one had just reappeared. A small, analytical part of her whispered that it must have somehow been recombined with an existing file, then missed in the subsequent error-sweep. Not that she was in any fit state to listen, of course. Jeanna could barely hear anything over the silent scream of panic building in her head.

Raverii fiddled with the control wand for a second. "Hold on," she said. "Just gotta turn this up." 

The volume increased, filling the cabin with Merlina's breathy moans. There was no way they could have been mistaken for cries of pain or distress, even with the most forgiving of interpretations. Jeanna's hands clenched tight around the arms of her seat as a security door click-clunked somewhere off camera. A heartbeat later, she saw herself wander into view, stepping neatly around Merlina's prone form. Another heartbeat and she turned towards her companion, nudging the chittering alien with the tip of her boot and exchanging a few words the cell's vox-thief couldn't pick up. 

A third and she stripped off her own robe, folded it neatly and lay down, spreading her legs for a second Q'orl. Jeanna watched in silent horror as she wrapped a hand around the beast's twitching ovipositor, pink and fleshy next to the mottled brown of its carapace, and guided it into her sex.

Raverii paused the footage. She was still grinning. Jeanna stared at the screen for several long, silent seconds, then swallowed the lump in her throat and turned towards the other woman.

"Well, given that neither Merlina nor myself have been tied to a stake and set on fire, I assume you haven't taken this to the authorities yes." Her voice was the low, false calm of one resigned to their fate. "So, it's blackmail, then?" 

"Blackmail?" For the first time, Raverii's glee vanished. She stared at the xenoarchivist in utter confusion, then abruptly burst out laughing. "Emperor's golden balls, J, no, it's not fuckin' blackmail." She jabbed a finger at the screen. "You got any idea what this is?"

"Evidence of...I'd count at least three capital crimes under the Pax Imperialis?"

"Well, yeah, obviously, but who gives a shit about that." Raverii snorted and waved dismissively. "Far as I'm concerned, our lords and masters have got bigger problems right now than us." She leaned closer, eyes bright with greed. "Nah, J. What this is, is an opportunity. There's money to be made here, a whole lot of it, or my name ain't Raverii Et Alion."

Jeanna frowned. Occasionally her eyes roamed back to the vidscreen, and the frozen debauchery which hovered on its blurry plastek surface. She could feel her earlier panic receding, but the suspicion which crept in to replace it did little to ease her worries, and sent a private vox-code to summon Merlina. Whatever was going to happen, she deserved to hear it for herself. 

"So you're talking about...selling recordings? Merlina and I, we made them for personal amusement. They weren't supposed to be seen by anyone else. For, I hope, obvious reasons."

"Recordings?" Raverii snorted and jerked a thumb at the vidscreen. "Nah. I mean, there'd be a market for it, but you can't see shit on these. Too blurry. The people who'd be interested in this - and trust me, they're out there - they'd want to see every gooshy detail. So I'm thinkin', we bring 'em here. Set up a little show." She grinned again, teeth flashing like a hungry void-shark ready to pounce. "Safer for the two of you as well. Recording gets out, falls into the wrong hands - some shitheel can go running to the authorities and claim they didn't know what was on it. This way, anyone paying to get in implicates themselves. They'd burn along with you."

It was an absurd idea. Insane. Arguably heretical as well - when it came to proscribed activities, what the Imperium would resentfully tolerate in private would earn a death sentence in public. Every instinct Jeanna possessed screamed at her to shoot Raverii's idea down, throw her off the station, then possibly shoot her gun-cutter down as well for good measure. 

But she didn't. For a moment Jeanna lingered, her guts twisting with the same anticipation she had felt before first entering the hormagaunt cell, all those months ago, then tapped her vox-bead. Merlina's soft voice echoed back.

"Jeanna? Something up?"

"You could say that. Come down to the docking bay, there's a matter we need to discuss."

\---

Merlina greeted the news with her habitual eerie detachment, only occasionally glancing towards the vidscreen as the other two women explained the situation. Rather than losing herself in an endless maze of worries and what-ifs, the Xenarite techpriestess simply began to pick at the realities of Raverii's plan, weaving her vague ideas into something more feasible. Initially it was entirely theoretical, but as the pieces began to come together, Jeanna's fraught sense of anticipation began to spread. Soon the three women were huddled tightly together, mulling over a blurry two-dimensional hologram of Antimedes projected from one of Merlina's implants.

"There's a room here we could use." Jeanna jabbed a finger at the flickering image. "It's an old audience chamber. Plenty of seating, but it's stepped, so they would be looking down onto the stage."

"Deep within the station, though. Any guests would have to be escorted quite a way."

"Eeeeh. Yeah. Views from the back would be shit as well." Raverii joined her voice to Merlina's. The pirate had abandoned her longcoat and now lay slouched on the bed in her bodice and under-armour, twirling a perfumed lho-stick in her fingers. She frowned, then waved it towards another room closer to Antimedes' external hull. "What about that one?"

The chamber blinked and expanded, resolving into a three-dimensional replica. It was a small officer's shrine left over from Antimedes' days as a deep-space auger satellite, built for no more than twenty or thirty worshippers at once. Padded pews were arranged in a tight semicircle around a raised podium, behind which stood a graven statue of the Emperor upon His throne.

"See, that would work." Raverii continued. "Nice and intimate. Looks like there's a reliquary vault in the next chamber, y'could keep your beasties in there until showtime."

"It's also a shrine," Jeanna cut in. She was about to continue when Merlina raised a silver finger to intervene.

"We could deconsecrate it easily enough. Any remaining holy icons could be moved to a new chamber. And the statue, well..." She offered the other two a small smile. "It has long been my belief that the Emperor-Omnissiah intended for all this. At best, this could be another sign of His favour."

"And if you're wrong?"

Merlina shrugged. "Then I doubt He could be any more angry than He is already."

"Fair point. It'll do, then. So we have a location, and, if Raverii's contacts are good, an audience. We can supply our own creatures, obviously." Jeanna murmured to herself, tapping the screen of her dataslate with a plastek stylus. "So we just need a volunteer to take centre stage. I don't suppose..."

Jeanna was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a prude. An active libido had been exalted among the wealthy families she came from as a sign of good health and virility. In her youth she had maintained a small circle of lovers and toy-boy servants, and even after being drafted into the Inquisition, had found ways of scratching that most personal of itches. But her affairs had been private things, taken place behind closed doors, and when she looked up to find Merlina and Raverii staring intently at her, the unspoken suggestion in their eyes set her heart racing.

"What? No. This was your idea, Raverii. And Merlina - you're the one who looks like a high-spire fashion doll, not me." 

"But you do have the most experience in xenosexual intercourse." Merlina replied. Then she grimaced, her optics clicking as she glanced away. "And we both know my augmentations tend to cause...mixed feelings in people."

"And I'll be runnin' the business end. Takin' money, making sure everyone's happy with their seats. Y'know, the boring bit." Raverii took a long drag on her lho-stick and playfully blew a cloud of perfumed smoke at the xenoarchivist. "C'mon, J. You're not a bad looking girl. And I watched that tape to the end, so I know you got the enthusiasm. You don't think that's something people'd want to see?"

No, Jeanna was not a prude. Nor was she a fool, and she knew when her ego was being stroked to another's benefit. But temptation had ever been her downfall, and even as she sat in the Raverii's cabin, chewing her lip and staring at the frozen image of herself, legs spread triumphantly beneath the chitinous alien Q'orl, she felt the idea tugging at her mind like a fishhook in the brain.

So much of her life had been spent in the background - the quiet, mousy third-daughter of a mid-spire noble house, the irritable student grappling alone with her studies, the cowering adept hiding behind her master as gunfire and screams split the air. And finally, the virtual prisoner, locked away on Antimedes, a prisoner of her own success. It would be nice, wouldn't it? To be seen? To be desired?

Just once?

Her mouth was dry. Jeanna looked at her companions and swallowed hard, tasting what she knew would be a lie even before it passed her lips.

"Alright," she said. "Just once."

\---

For a while, it all seemed like a dream. Raverii departed aboard the Midnight Lady to arrange an audience, while Merlina and Jeanna got stuck into the more mundane details of arranging and preparing the show itself. Their days were dominated with the physical work of deconsecrating and renovating the chapel, their nights lost to technical discussions of whom, how, and what would happen during the actual performance. None of it felt real - like a grand and vaguely amusing indulgence of theory, or as though it were being prepared for somebody else.

It was only later, after Jeanna had sneaked away to peruse the pleasures of her collection, that everything fell into place. Face down with her hindquarters in the air, the greasy belly-hair of a Donorian Fiend dragging along her back and its throbbing, simian cock buried deep in her sex, the reality of the situation crashed down upon her. In no more than ten days time she would be doing this before a crowd of strangers. Strangers who had come to Antimedes not for trade, but for the explicit purpose of seeing her fucked by an alien.

The climax which followed had been one of the most unsettling experiences of the xenoarchivist's life. Jeanna's stomach had lurched, clenched - the sudden onslaught of nerves wracking Jeanna to her core, even as her breath hitched and caught in her throat with the sudden excitement of it all. It left her trembling and restless for hours afterwards, haunted by visions of eyes shining in the dark, gazing at her with...

With what? Revulsion? Adoration? Or, perhaps worst of all, simple boredom?

Speaking with Merlina helped. The techpriestess seemed vaguely amused by Jeanna's nerves, her lens-clusters clicking and spinning on their gimbals as they spoke.

"It's not like this is completely new," she had said. "You seemed rather keen on demonstrating how to lie with each of your pets before allowing me to participate." 

"That was different. I was doing it so you wouldn't get hurt."

Merlina had smiled then, the expression small and knowing. "No, I think you liked having the chance to show off. You're a proud woman, Jeanna. Maybe it's because you're noble-born - I don't know, it isn't my place to guess. But there's part of you that wants to be seen." She tapped the xenoarchivist in the chest with a silver finger. "It's why you make those recordings. So you can appreciate yourself, even if nobody else does."

Something about her companion's words struck a chord. Jeanna grumbled stubbornly, as she so often did when corrected on a point, but couldn't deny that Merlina's assessment was correct. She began to experiment with bringing mirrors into the holding pens, forcing herself to make eye contact with her own reflections as she was rutted by one alien horror after another. It felt odd at first - like an invason of her privacy, even when she was alone bar a single alien - but by the fourth attempt had become almost mundane, and by the sixth, exciting. In her quieter moments she would scurry away to her quarters and strike poses, trying to imagine herself from a man's perspective, or else simply walk Antimedes' corridors unclothed, going about her nightly business until the sensation of her own nudity ceased to be a bother.

Slowly, as the date of the show crept closer, Jeanna felt her nerves receding. They never truly left, of course, but they were increasingly tinged with excitement. Her nightly planning sessions with Merlina became less technical, more animated, dominated by breathless talk of how the night might be tailored to suit a theme of their choosing.

Which, of course, finally left the daily chores involved with deconsecrating and rebuilding the old chapel. Boxes of rosary beads and Aquilas were moved into storage, while the handful of mildewed holy books to have survived their long isolation were reverently interred within Antimedes' primary shrine chamber. The pulpit, too, was removed, leaving a raised platform perhaps a meter off the ground, large enough for four people to comfortably stand side by side. Soon the only indications of the room's original purpose were the holy friezes carved into the pews, and the towering statue of the Emperor which loomed above all.

That, however, was something neither woman could do anything about. A blindfold was suggested, but that felt somehow more sacrilegious than leaving the statue untouched, and eventually Jeanna was forced to accept the Emperor would be a final, and perhaps unwilling, member of her audience. 

Other modifications to the chamber were made. Lights were added to the roof, and a quartet of servo-skulls bearing picters were programmed to orbit the stage, which the audience members could access through a dataslate provided with their seat. Carpets were laid, heating installed, the bare metal walls hidden behind replicas of erotic paintings brought in from Raverii's contacts. Pews were rearranged according to what Merlina calculated as 'mathematically superior angles', and, finally, four vidscreens linked to the same set of servo-skulls were built into the stage where Jeanna was to perform.

"Because I know how much you enjoy watching yourself," the techpriestess had explained with a smirk. 

The choice of what aliens to use had never been in doubt. Voracity and Alacrity, the two newly-named hormagaunts Jeanna had indulged herself with so long ago, were the only two creatures the xenoarchivist trusted not to react unpredictably in front of an audience. That they were a comforting point of familiarity was an additional blessing. Jeanna spent hours with the two in the final few days, polishing their waxy red carapaces and bony talons until they shone. 

Voracity was the larger and more impressive of the two, its carapace and chitinous black hide alike studded with lasburns and shrapnel scars, and less prone to flighty aggression than its younger sibling. Jeanna intended it to be her opposite star, with Alacrity held in the wings for later if the audience demanded an encore. She floated the idea of Merlina joining her on stage in such an event, but her companion was, if anything, even more uneasy at the prospect of baring herself in front of a room full of strangers than Merlina had been. Whatever mental scars her troubled upbringing - or, perhaps, manufacture - had caused seemingly ran too deep to entertain the idea for long.

Finally, Antimedes' lobotomised and insensate astropath took a communication from Raverii. She confirmed that an audience had been found and payment from each taken, and that they would be arriving the next day at the switchover from Antimedes' day- to night-cycle. Content that all that could be done, had been done, the two women and their pet monsters retired, waiting for whatever the next day would bring.

\---

Showtime.

The night passed in a sleepless haze of anticipation; the day in a panicky last-minute whirlwind of double- and triple-checks. But finally the evening came; the guests arrived, shepherded in aboard one of Raverii's luxurious transport shuttles and whisked away to a waiting room where she and Merlina explained how things would work. All precautions had been taken for their safety, they were told, but please, remain seated for the duration of the show. Refreshments, sadly, would not be provided. Their mouths, Raverii assured them, would be watering enough once things got underway,

Five women, seven men. All human, bar an elegant Sslyth pirate-lord who suggested an interest in participating more intimately in future shows. One by one they were shown to their seats, slouching sceptically into the comfortable pews or leaning forwards, elbows on their knees as they stared into the darkness beyond the stage. A few cast glances towards the graven statue of the Emperor who stared grimly down at them from above, as if placed there to remind any potential betrayers that the Imperium would judge them all with equal severity.

A low hum of conversation built as they waited. Raverii and Merlina walked among them, answering questions with mysterious smiles or bawdy innuendo as often as with clear facts, before silently retreating as the chamber's lights were suddenly extinguished. For three torturous heartbeats the audience sat there, conversations snuffed, their senses straining against the darkness which had engulfed them.

Then, finally, a long, rattling hiss cut the air like a knife. Lumins began to glow, surrounding the stage with a warm haze of light, illuminating the two figures which had appeared upon it.

Jeanna was utterly, perfectly, naked. She was not a beautiful woman, but careful strokes of paint and powder had softened the hard lines of her face, and her blond hair fell loose around her narrow shoulders like a martyr's halo. The prayer-beads and rosaries saved from the former shrine had been wound around her forearms, and hanging from her neck, cradled between her modest breasts atop her heart, was the Inquisitorial rosette once bequeathed by her former master. Servo-skulls orbited her like planets around a star, their picters chattering, ensuring the audience could witness every dimple and curve.

Coiled possessively around her legs was Voracity; the hormagaunt's whipcord body glistened with lubricating slime and perfumed oils, the wax-crested prayer strips affixed to its spinal carapace plates rustling softly as it rose onto its hooves. Eyes as dead and black as the void roamed over the audience, regarding them with empty, alien hunger. Jeanna caressed the creature's bulbous skull, her delicate fingers trailing backwards along ridges of chitin and tangling around its spiny, slippery tongue. 

All was still. Jeanna kept her eyes to the ceiling, her expression calm despite the raging swell of emotions in her chest. She felt, rather than saw, the audience running their eyes over her boyish frame, devouring every inch as hungrily as if she were a gene-bred courtesan. There was something more than just desire in those looks - anticipation, excitement, even awe. Standing in the back she caught sight of Raverii and Merlina, who offered her an eager thumbs up and a small smile of encouragement.

"This is mankind's galaxy," Jeanna began. Her voice was soft, but it reverberated through the chamber to reach every ear in the audience. "All others live only by our sufferance, and we are told that few of them will be allowed to witness our final triumph. But must this be the case?"

Her gaze turned down, sweeping slowly across a dozen faces, staring rapt with attention. "It is no great challenge to slay the alien. One pulls a trigger or twists a blade, and an unclean life ends. How much more worthy of praise, then, is it to pacify the alien? To see them broken and humbled, and remade in a form more fitting to our needs?"

Slowly Jeanna sank to her knees. Her heart was racing, thrashing a desperate taboo against her breastbone. Voracity hissed, leaning in close and butting its horned muzzle against her shoulder as she ran a hand along its fanged jaws. A chorus of low murmurs came from the audience as her hand roamed along the alien's body, trailing the length of its whipcord-thin form before slipping between its legs. It was already hard, phallus twitching, warm strings of slippery precome slithering across the xenoarchivist's fingers. 

"Witness now, this beast of the stars, spawned to bring ruin to mankind and his works, now turned to our cause. For your entertainment..." Jeanna slipped lower, resting on her elbows as Voracity reared up and awkwardly attempted to mount her from the front, its midclaws scratching stinging lines across her shoulders. So intently was she focused on the audience - and the intense heat building in her belly - that she barely felt the pain, too busy searching their faces for any sign of revulsion or contempt.

She saw none. Curiosity from most. Unease from some, disbelief from others. Naked hunger from the most jaded. Locking eyes with a pretty red-haired woman in the eclectic uniform of a merchant trader, Jeanna wrapped her fingers around the base of Voracity's cock and smiled, the familiar sweet-sour stink of the monster's body filling the air like perfume.

"...and my pleasure," she finished, pulling the alien's prick close and wrapping her lips around its crown.

The gasp which went up from the audience was music to Jeanna's ears. Part of her wondered what exactly Raverii had sold them on; how many had expected some kind of erotic dance or stage-play, any actual congress with the alien veiled behind mummer's tricks and metaphor. But not a soul moved from their seat as Jeanna let out a deep and indulgent moan, swirling her tongue around Voracity's gnarled tip and sinking slowly down its ribbed, glistening shaft. The hormagaunt's tongue lolled drunkenly from between its jaws, drooling long strings of saliva across Jeanna's back even as its prick convulsed and spilled sour precome into her mouth.

Servo-skulls flitted around the pair, their picters chattering. One passed by the xenoarchivist's hindquarters, focusing briefly on her sex, flushed and glistening with arousal. Another ducked beneath Voracity's black exoskeleton to bring Jeanna's face into fine detail, recording every soft suck and slurp as she fellated the creature, lips gliding along its shaft and throat pulsing as she drank deep of its emissions. Others swept along Voracity's lithe body, circling the tyranid monster as it tensed and shook and thrust against Jeanna's palm, almost vibrating with the need to drive itself deeper into its mate for a proper rut.

"Do you think it understands what she's doing?" A voice drifted from the crowd. "Throne above all, look at those talons. It could cut her in half."

"It's all so...so real." came another. "I didn't think it would be quite so..."

"So hot?" A third chimed in, her voice deep and husky. Jeanna opened her sole organic eye and scanned the crowd, picking out a scarred, heavily muscled bear of a woman loosening the collar of her jacket. "I bet that thing fucks like a machine once it gets going."

Despite everything Jeanna snorted with laughter, her stage persona slipping as she spluttered around Voracity's cock. It rattled with frustration, thrusting aggressively and smearing a long line of glistening fluid along the woman's cheek and into her hair. "Trust me, they do," Jeanna called out. "Excellent stamina, boundless energy. And when they get in at the right angle, well." Jeanna ran a finger along Voracity's aching shaft to illustrate her point, following every strange ridge and undulating curve of the burning alien organ. "There really is nothing like it."

The thought left her shaking with need, her sex furnace-hot and aching to be filled. Her breasts tingled and every so often she would slip a hand down to caress herself, fingers dancing across tender flesh and tweaking motes of pleasure from her stiff nipples. Voracity seemed in little better a state; its phallus was rampant in her palm, swollen and pulsing in time with its alien heartbeat. It was reaching its peak, Jeanna realised; its skeletal flanks heaving with exertion, its breaths as rasping and fevered as her own. Precome coated her hands and stretched into sticky webs between her fingers. It was close. It was so close.

This hadn't been part of the plan, Jeanna thought distantly. She had only planned to use her mouth until Voracity was ready to fuck her properly, before bringing the performance to an end. But, her ego flushed with attention and her xenophilious urges in full bloom, she began to see what a fool's hope that had been. As foolish, perhaps, as her promise to Raverii that this would be the only show of its kind. The audience leaned in, their whispered conversations falling silent as Jeanna's tongue danced across the hormagaunt's puckered crown. 

They knew what was going to happen. They knew - even those still showing restraint knew, in some deep, primal part of themselves - what was going to happen, and they longed for it. And so she lavished Voracity's monstrous phallus with licks and kisses, teasing it mercilessly until the tyranid let out a final shriek of mindless, tortured lust and ejaculated across her face. Even then, Jeanna kept going; she swallowed what she could and wore the rest proudly, rolling onto her back and milking thick pulses of alien seed across her breasts and belly and beyond. 

Her head spun. Her sex clenched, a pang of need so intense it was almost painful shooting through her. Arousal burned hot in her belly, as though the tingling warmth of Voracity's issue coating her skin had seared straight to her very core. The hormagaunt hissed in primal satisfaction and stepped away, its hooves clicking and talons digging into the stage as it prowled Jeanna's prone form.

Slowly, she looked up. The rich, sour stink of tyranid semen hung heavy in the air. Every pair of eyes in the room was locked upon her - the audience's, Merlina's, Raverii's. They stared, enraptured, as thick globs of seed trickled down her slender form, trailing between her breasts, smothering the Inquisitorial rosette hanging over her heart. Most were blushing. Some were almost as flushed with arousal as Jeanna herself was. Someone applauded softly.

"Did you like that?" Jeanna rose to her knees, drawing her hands up the length of her body, trailing them through the semen which clung there and licking them clean. "Do you want to see more?"

Her voice was a breathless whisper, heavy with need, and seemed to hang in the air for longer than should have been possible. She felt different - more aggressive, more alive, more...more everything, more than the mousy, short-tempered woman she had once been had any claim to be. Without waiting for a response Jeanna tossed her hair and lunged forwards, falling back onto all fours and grinning fiercely at the awestruck faces which surrounded her.

"Let's do it."

Voracity landed on her back half a heartbeat later. Jeanna buckled, taking the alien's weight, then recovered, pushing back as it hissed and snapped and scrabbled into position. It was still beautifully hard, its ferocious breeding instincts etched too deeply to be satisfied with a single climax, and its phallus smeared a sticky trail across her rump as the alien squirmed into position. There was no more restraint, no more doubt - Jeanna's heart raged in her chest, inflamed with twisted passion and pride alike, and she gasped in unrestrained pleasure each time the hormagaunt's prick dragged fruitlessly across her waiting sex. Servo-skulls whizzed and flitted, circling the air, hungry to ensure the audience could savour every gristly detail of the coming penetration.

They cheered when it happened. If any of them had yet to be converted, they were won over the moment Voracity's gnarled, alien cock finally caught on Jeanna's flushed lips and sank, straight and true, into the waiting embrace of her body. Her back arched, her fingers clenched - a searing wave of ecstasy crashed through her, the shock of it like a barrel of promethium hurled into an inferno, enough to drive her straight into a climax of her own. Silken walls, aching with need and sopping with arousal, fluttered and clenched tight around the monstrous invaded, hugging it deep and refusing to let go. And it didn't end - Voracity was moving before Jeanna had even halfway recovered, thrusting madly, pummelling her with brutal, possessive thrusts that left the xenoarchivist trembling and wailing in delight. 

There was little Jeanna could do but let the beast guide her motions, rocking back and forth beneath Voracity as the alien found its pace. Steadily it worked its prick deeper into the velvety embrace of her sex, fresh spurts of precome coating her walls and easing its passage, until the scrape of rough chitin against her backside told her there was nothing more to come. Shaking off the last of her climax, Jeanna opened her eyes to find Voracity laid out atop her, her back arched, its slimy body sliding back and forth across her shoulder blades as it thrust. The monster's head hung next to hers, its rattling breaths deafening in her ear, and without a second thought Jeanna turned to place a delicate kiss on its bony cranium.

Voracity responded with a long lick across her cheek. Jeanna laughed and replied in kind, lapping at the tyranid's fanged maw as it fucked her. Its fangs parted again, shining in the dim light, and this time she was ready; Jeanna caught the hormagaunt's tongue between her lips and sucked, her own tongue twirling around the lashing, spiny organ, moaning softly and drawing so close she could feel Voracity's needle-sharp teeth graze her chin and its tongue squirm halfway down her throat. 

This was more than just sex; Jeanna wasn't just fucking, she was performing. Every motion was pushed to its extreme, every gasp and whimper exaggerated until the chapel rang with a hymn of lust. Those closest to her had drawn forwards, sitting on the very edge of their seats, their eyes wide and feverish. The sight made her heart swell and her head spin; Jeanna had never seen another human look upon her with such naked desire before, and she found it very much to her approval. She could almost feel their urge to draw closer, to touch her, to hold her, to claim her just as surely as the drooling, slime-slick monster bucking atop her had.

Perhaps, part of her thought, next time, she might be able to entertain such ideas. The idea stirred something in her core, a hot, urgent flush of arousal that left her trembling and aflame.

"She's really into it," someone said. Those towards the back had fallen momentarily still, stunned by the display of monstrous intimacy before them, their eyes torn between the two mismatched lovers atop the stage and the lurid details screaming out from their dataslate picts. "Throne above, just look at her. You can't fake that sort of thing."

"Tell me, husband dear," another voice murmured, "why you've never kissed me like that? I have half a mind to leave you here and take one of those things home in your place."

It was enough to make Jeanna grin with pride. Voracity snapped at her hair as she broke their embrace and tossed her head, searching out who among the audience had spoken last.

"Stay after the show if you - if you like," she panted. Her voice came in broken fragments, panting as warmth bloomed and spread in her core, each stroke of Voracity's cock stirring her arousal like embers turned by a poker. "I'm - I'm sure we can arrange a - a private session if you - "

Whatever Jeanna had been about to say collapsed into a long, lusty moan. It was hard to concentrate - hard to think, even, her thoughts turning warm and gooey as she worked towards her second climax. Voracity was hugging her tight, its midclaws wrapped around her slender torso, the undulating ridges which circled its phallus dragging tortuously back and forth across her aching flesh with every thrust. She felt herself shaking - straining, toes clenched and knuckles white where she gripped the edge of the stage - and sensed the hormagaunt doing the same, its whip-thin form stretched taut as it rutted her all the harder.

It was close. She was close. Her guts were a knotted mess of heat and pressure, raging and desperate for release. One by one the whispers died away as every face in the chamber turned towards the stage, watching in pregnant silence as the figures entwined upon it reached for their climaxes. Raverii leaned against the opposite wall, affecting nonchalance despite chewing her lip so hard it bled. Only Merlina seemed at ease, her arousal betrayed by a faint, pink tinge to her porcelain features as she guided her servo-skulls around the monstrous coupling.

"Come on," Jeanna whispered. Voracity snarled something and surged forwards, claws digging into her pale skin, chitin rasping across her back. Piece by piece she felt the world around her falling away, until there nothing but the stage, the alien, and the desperate, crawling tension of her budding climax. Even the audience vanished from her thoughts. "Come on, please, please, give it to me."

When it happened, it happened very suddenly. Jeanna felt herself drawn thin, every fibre of her being stretched as taut as a heretic on an autorack. Voracity's cock was burning steel clad in velvet, reaching ever-deeper into the furnace which raged in her heart, as if it sought to touch the monstrous desire the beast had kindled within her. The moment stretched, dragged - and then finally snapped as Jeanna came ruinously, shaking, squirting, mewling thin gasps of pleasure as rivers of burning arousal cascaded down her thighs and pooled on the stage beneath them. The xenoarchivist held herself upright for three fluttering heartbeats before her strength failed and she slumped forwards, ass high in the air as Voracity rode her to its own conclusion.

It didn't keep her waiting long, and for the first time, Jeanna saw the alien's climax before she felt it. One of Merlina's servo-skulls had slipped around and beneath them; its feed passed to the screens on the stage, Jeanna watched the alien prick embedded in her sex began to tremble and swell, a thick vein along its underside bulging obscenely. Voracity tensed its thighs, gave voice to a final, triumphant snarl, and drove itself as deep as it could, the last inch and a half of its swollen prick rippling with peristaltic motion as it pumped Jeanna's womanhood full of alien seed. 

There was so much. There was always so much, Jeanna thought dizzily; the beasts had been made to perpetrate an endless cycle of consumption and reproduction, and with the former denied to them, it was as if their instincts had switched entirely to the latter. She could feel pulse after pulse of tyranid semen spraying across her silken walls, boiling, bubbling, filling up every intimate space she possessed only to drip forth in long strings once there were no more to be found. Voracity towered over her, its dead eyes turned to the audience, teeth bared until it had drained itself dry. Only then did it give a rattling sound of contentment and withdraw, its cock slapping wetly against Jeanna's thigh and spilling a torrent of pearly liquid onto the stage.

The silence stretched. Nobody spoke. Nobody breathed. For a moment, Jeanna didn't dare to move, suddenly afraid that the audience might have turned at the last, whatever dim embers of faith they possessed given new life by the act of rampant xenophilia they had witnessed.

Then, finally, someone began to clap. And another. And another. And then they were all applauding, laughing, red-faced and sweaty with arousal, legs crossed uncomfortably or spread wide in defiance. Jeanna breathed a sigh of relief and awkwardly sat up, dangling her legs over the edge of the stage and pushing her lank, sweaty hair away from her face. Then somebody cheered her name and she laughed, grinning so widely she felt her head would fall off and offering the assembled guests a bow. 

She felt ten years younger. Throne above, Jeanna thought, she felt like a completely different person. Turning to the statue which loomed overhead, Jeanna kissed her palm and raised it towards the Emperor's stony features, the devotional beads tied around her forearms rattling softly as she mouthed a brief prayer. If the Lord of Terra objected to her activities, she decided, he'd had his chance to intervene.

Then Merlina was there, sweeping before the stage with her hands raised, explaining that lodgings had been prepared and that Raverii would see them escorted back to their vessels at the beginning of Antimedes' next day-cycle. A handful of the guests stood ready to leave, until a voice cried out from the back.

"Encore!" the man cried. "Fuckin' encore!"

"Yeah!" Another cried out - a woman this time, the red-haired merchant trader, her voice high and feverish. "Get the cog-girl up there as well!"

Merlina froze dead. Only her optics moved, ticking and clicking on their circular mounts. Behind her, Voracity clattered up to the edge of the stage and settled back onto its haunches, glaring savagely at the hooting mob arranged before them. Its cock had shrunk, but Jeanna knew from experience it would take little effort to rouse the beast again, and that their mating-frenzies could last for a very long time indeed.

"Mer?" Jeanna said, softly, reaching out to brush a hand against the techpriestess' arm. She knew how...delicate Merlina could be around other people, the issues she had about her artificial body. But she could also see the delicate flush on her companion's face spreading, and the brief looks the other woman was throwing at Voracity's organ, still twitching glistening with fluid. A lens clicked in place and a small shiver ran down Merlina's spine.

"You don't have to if you don't want to, Mer," Jeanna continued. "Up to you. You can bring Alacrity out and I can go another round with him if you like. But..." she trailed off for a moment. Voracity's seed trickled down her thighs, warm against her pale skin and glittering like pearls under the floodlights. Without quite knowing why, Jeanna leaned back and spread her legs, idly trailing a finger up through the mess until it reached her sex and began tracing lazy little circles around her clit. "But...I mean, they came here to see me mating with an alien. I doubt they'll be put off by some non-standard bionics."

"Hmm." Merlina made a thoughtful little noise. Her spidery optics ticked around a few rotations, flicking from the xenoarchivist, to the hissing alien crouched at her side, then the audience watching eagerly behind. She bit her lip, wavered for a second, then seemed to reach a decision. Without another word Merlina swiftly hiked up her skirts and departing though the rear stage door, leaving a chorus of vulgar chorus of boos floating in her wake. 

The audience's discontent, however, didn't last. The techpriestess returned a minute later, Alacrity skittering eagerly along in her wake. There was a hasty scuffle as they piled back into their seats, just in time to see Merlina turn in a lazy circle and strip away her outer robe, before tossing it daintily to the side. She was naked underneath, sleek augmentations of alien design girding her ribs and running the length of her spine, artificially whitened skin flushed pink with nerves. There was a moment of hesitation - long enough for the audience to devour the sight of her slender, porcelain-and silver body, before she knelt next to Jeanna and caressed Alacrity's skull with obvious affection. It rattled eagerly, clacking its jaws and flicking its spiny tongue across her face by way of reply, cock already hard and throbbing with urgency.

"It feels strange," Merlina murmured. "Being looked at like this."

"Like what?" Jeanna replied. She reached out and placed a hand on her companion's shoulder, leaning close enough to pick up her scent of machine oil and incense.

"Like...like they want to look at me. Like they don't think I look strange. Or that they don't care." The techpriestess glanced shyly away. She was still avoiding the audience's eyes, but couldn't conceal the small, satisfied smile that flickered briefly across her ruby lips. "But I think I like it. How do you want to do this?"

Jeanna's eyes flicked towards the faces arranged around them. "Let's give them a change. On our backs."

Her fingers lingered, stroking down Merlina's soft, cool skin and shining cybernetics as she guided the other woman onto her back and parted her legs. Merlina trembled softly, her arachnid lenses focused entirely on Alacrity as it clacked closer, drawn to the scent of her arousal. The hormagaunt paused for a moment, head cocked like a bird, eyes roaming over the two women as Jeanna slipped her hand lower and brushed it over Merlina's sex, parting her lips with two fingers.

There was an intake of breath from the crowd. Alacrity was the more intelligent of the two hormagaunts, and it didn't take the creature long to understand what was expected of it. Jeanna nibbled softly at the techpriestess' ear as her monstrous paramour lowered itself onto her, taking its prick in one hand and guiding it gently into her waiting sex. There was a gasp, a hitching whine of pleasure, and that was that - Jeanna released her grip and watched as Alacrity lunged into Merlina's embrace, rutting her with desperate, pent-up fury.

"Gorgeous. Throne above, she's beautiful. Look at how she's holding it, too," someone murmured, staring as Merlina wrapped her silver limbs around the bucking alien. She moaned long and deep, hugging the alien close to her chest like a lover, an expression of utter bliss spreading across the techpriestess' face. Jeanna watched for a while before lying down next to her, her legs spread, head tipped off the edge of the stage, eyes locked upon the audience. Soon enough she felt Voracity drape itself across her, its tongue twisting along her neck, its bony chest scraping at her nipples, its prick searching for her entrance. 

Her gaze sought out Raverii, standing alone and silent at the back of the hall. The pirate was panting almost as heavily as Merlina was, her face flushed, eyes as wide as saucers. Something limp and sodden hung from the pocket of her coat, and Jeanna almost laughed when she realised it was the woman's underwear. She thought about calling out - about inviting her to join them as well - but the thought slipped from her mind as Voracity penetrated her once more. 

Jeanna raised her legs with a sigh of pleasure and wrapped them around the hormgaunt's narrow hips, just as her companion had done, welcoming the fanged, slime-slick alien monster into the temple of her body once more. She felt its heat and its hardness, its single-minded lust, heard the coos and gasps of encouragement from the audience, and let out a breathless cry of unadulterated pleasure. And then there was just herself and Merlina, side by side as they were mated beneath a pair of hissing tyranids, and the adoration of the crowd, and the stony, silent gaze of the Emperor looking down from on high.

She couldn't imagine wanting anything else.

\---

They were there for hours. 

On their backs. On their fronts. Fucked until they could barely think straight. Lips wrapped around alien phalluses. Fingers caressed bony exoskeletons. They took it in turns, one woman holding the other as she was spitroasted by the beasts, alien seed flowing into her throat and sex alike. They kissed, face to face, as they were rutted from behind, moaning and wailing into one another's mouths. The crowd ate it all up, their own inhibitions slowly falling away until they began to pair off in the pews or seek relief in the form of a crooked finger or cupped palm.

But finally, once the bizarre foursome had run its course, the show came to an end. Dripping head to toe with sweat and seed, Jeanna and Merlina had dismounted the stage upon shaking legs, linked hands and bowed to the audience, who bathed them in applause and adoration in return. Raverii had flashed the two a brilliant smile before leading their guests to prepared sleeping chambers, though it seemed doubtful any of them would get much rest after what they had witnessed.

It was only then, with the guests gone and a shift of servitors assigned to clean and sterilise the chamber, that Jeanna and Merlina retired to Antimedes' hygene chambers and cleansed themselves of their exertions. Warm, comforting robes were donned and a small pile of sucrose-carb bars summoned from the station's reserves, and the two settled into Jeanna's chambers to unwind. Neither spoke much; both were content with their thoughts and the other's company as they came to terms with what they had experienced.

For Jeanna, the show had been a confirmation of her philosophies; such a visceral display of xenophilia, performed not just to a circle of uninitiated observers but within sight of the Emperor himself, had purged the last of her doubts. Whatever lingering loyalties she had to Brochus Railiey or his original purposes had been thoroughly expunged. Antimedes was no longer a place where new ways of destroying the alien were uncovered, but one where more enlightened minds would focus entirely on finding new ways of bending them to humanity's will - and, of course, enjoying the results. 

Merlina had only played a supporting role in Jeanna's performance, but it had affected her more deeply than either woman could have imagined. For the first time, her archival meme-vaults returned feelings of confidence and contentment. It had been something forced upon her, true. A failed experiment in mathematical beauty, yes. But while most baseline humans found themselves unnerved by her artificial elegance, or else looked down upon her as a mongrel unable to fully commit to the Adeptus Mechanicus' spiritual mission, she had proof that her artificial, eerie beauty was not a thing of utter repugnance. 

It wasn't long before they were joined by Raverii, the ebon-skinned pirate grinning fit to burst and escorted by a servitor loaded down with steaming cups of recaff and an impressive heap of physical currency-slates. Jeanna was too tired to bother trying to recognise all the denominations or estimate how much it was worth, but it was a lot.

"Ladies, ladies, you've made me bloody proud," Raverii cackled, flopping down on the rotary chair next to Jeanna's desk and spinning gleefully around towards them. "Half of the tight-fisted bastards out there tipped! They actually tipped! Couple of 'em said they thought it was only fair, what with the two of yer getting involved, and I reckon some of the others are looking to help fund the next one." She raised an eyebrow and inclined her head towards Jeanna. "'Course, I told 'em there was going to be a next one. Trust you're not gonna make a liar out of me?"

The xenoarchivist stretched, smiling thinly and wiggling her toes. "Mm. Well. I'm sure something could be arranged. Speaking of which, you seemed to be getting a little flustered toward the end, there. I don't suppose you've considered indulging yourself?"

Raverii's grin faltered for a moment, but both women could see the way she shifted, the brief way her thighs rubbed together at the thought. "Aye, well, I thought, since the two of you are experts - "

"That we could give you a proper introduction?" Merlina cut in. One of her larger lenses ticked, an expression Jeanna recognised as similar to raising an eyebrow. "Come now, Raverii. You seemed very keen to pimp us out. But you don't think you should have a more personal idea of what it is you're selling?"

"Well, er, that's not quite - " the pirate cleared her throat. Her eyes flicked left and right, but seemed unable to rest on either woman's face. She settled for staring off into the middle distance, absent-mindedly chewing her bottom lip. A bead of sweat ran down her neck and lingered, pearl-like, upon the swell of her cleavage. "Though I suppose it couldn't...might be...er..."

Jeanna sipped at her recaff, watching the other woman squirm with clear amusement. "I can suggest something a little more gentle, if you'd like. Voracity and Alacrity will need their rest anyway."

Merlina threw her a glance. "Ah. The Thyruss, then?"

"Mmm. The Thyruss, yes." The two women stood, sweeping over to Raverii and slipping their arms under her shoulders. She let out a squall of protest, but didn't fight as Jeanna and Merlina lifted her from the chair and guided her from the room, back down towards the holding cells. 

"Well, can't say I didn't see this bloody coming," Raverii muttered. "Better be as good as you two trollops made it look."

Jeanna laughed. "Oh, trust me, it is," she said, her eyes gleaming slyly in the dim light. "Tell me, though. How do you feel about tentacles?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written January 2021


End file.
